Dr. Olcott: Yeah. Same thing. We just don’t have those down here.

Tammy: Right. Okay. Well tell me a little bit about when somebody comes in to see you for the first time with their pygmy goat, what do you think are the biggest things that they’re not aware of?

Dr. Olcott: I guess other than that…And I’d say nutrition is number one. I’d put that way up at the top of the list. Things after that that they often seem to be unaware of until it’s too late would be some of the very common, I call them frequent and fatal, diseases of goats and those would be clostridium profringes, which causes over-eating disease or enterotoxemia and that would be clostridium tetana that causes tetanus in goats. So from a disease standpoint, those are two of the readily preventable diseases and because they don’t know about those, they don’t prevent them and unfortunately when we see those diseases, it’s an animal that’s dead or dying from the disease. So just installing an easy little vaccination program, those are two of the antigens that we would always recommend that goats get immunized for starting at about a month of age and then getting the annual boosters for the rest of their lives.

Tammy: Okay. And those two disease are something they can just pick up from the ground right?

Dr. Olcott: Both of those bacteria that cause that live in the ground. You know most goats will have clostrium profinges living in their intestinal tract their whole lifetime, but since they have immunity to it, the disease just can’t grow and produce the toxin the way it needs to, to hurt them.

Tammy: You know I want to go back up here to the pregnancy toxemia because we haven’t talked about that at all. I’ve not heard about that. And some pygmy goat owners are going to go ahead I’m sure and get a doe and a buck to have babies. What can they do to prevent that?
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