Tammy: Right. And it’s common in wethers right?

Dr. Olcott: It’s very common in wethers and if they’ve been castrated at a really early age, it’s really, really, really common and that is just a miserable thing for the rest of his life. So if you do get a wether, get one that’s as close to puberty that you can stand before he gets castrated. So not one that’s been castrated in the first few weeks or month of life, but one that’s been castrated after he’s three, four months of age, somewhere in that neighborhood. That effect that that has is it does increase the diameter of the urethra, which is the tube that urine flows through down his penis, and it just means that those small stones will go through that without getting caught.

Tammy: Because even if you follow a good diet they can still get those stones. Is that right?

Dr. Olcott: Yeah you can cut your odds way down. There’s some other things we can talk about you can do as well to decrease the chance of that happening.

Tammy: Okay. Talk about those.

Dr. Olcott: Okay. All right. The critical things for preventing that disease, and diet we already spoke about that’s number one, but other things that are done – and most of these are pretty simple – is just having plenty of really fresh water available at all times for that goat. Goats are real picky about the water they drink. They don’t like drinking water that’s sitting out in the sun that’s hot and they don’t like drinking dirty kind of green scummy water, but if you can supply cool, fresh water to them they’re water consumption goes up fairly impressively and what that does then is that water just always keeps that urine dilute and so they have less opportunity to have super saturated solutions of salts in their urine that are going to precipitated and cause the crystals to begin.
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