Poor Nappy! His grandfather was polled, his father was polled, his sister was polled ... he was disbudded TWICE and his horns came back again last fall. Unfortunately, one of them was growing so wildly it was headed towards an eye so we had our vet surgically remove both. She says this should solve the problem, but there is always that very small chance that they will come back again. For those of you who haven't had to do this, I posted a picture of my sweetie with his head wrapped. It leaves gaping holes where the horns are removed and Nappy is in his third week of wrapping and doing great. To avoid any injury while he's healing, he's confined in a pen in the barn where he can at least see the other goats. Since it's so cold (we're expecting snow tonight) we don't have to worry about flies, but we have a heat lamp in there to keep him warm.
The day after his "surgery" I saw something that looked like "leakage" on his bandages ... turned out to be chicken droppings from a hen that was sitting on the fence...so glad it hit the bandage and not an open wound. It probably does heal faster without the bandages, but our vet tends to err on the side of caution.
We just had our vet take off huge scurs on a mature buck we purchased. We waited a couple of months until the weather cooled and the flies died off before taking him in. In the meantime he terrorized one of our older bucks with his scurs. He had open sinus cavities for a couple of weeks, but our vet prefers to just leave them open without bandages. He did fine and our older buck is very relieved!
Nappy is about 8 months old now. A friend of mine also had to do this to one of his bucks and he told me what an ordeal it was and said he'd never do that again. But we're lucky to have a vet that actually talks to us - we went over the options and she said cutting them back was usually a temporary fix and no telling which direction they'd grow back in. Since she was doing the one horn, we just had her do both to avoid any future problems with the other one (neither one was growing in "normally"). I'm sure he had a terrible headache the first few days (even on pain meds and antibiotics), but he's very sweet-tempered and appears to be dealing with it well - hasn't tried to rub off the head wrap. For him and us, this was the best option.
Poor boy! Three weeks and you're still dealing with bandages? I knew it was bad, but that's even worse than I was expecting. I have a buck with a wild scur that's getting out of control. We've cut it back a couple times, but I swear that just made it grow faster. I've been thinking that if we're going to take him to the vet, now is the time to do it because there are no flies.
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