Tammy: So if you have one or two goats, how much water do you think that they should be drinking a day?

Dr. Olcott: Well kind of rule of thumb that we use is about a gallon per 100 pounds. Now pygmies don’t go quite that heavy so it’s going to depend on the size of them, but half a gallon for a 50-pound goat, somewhere in that neighborhood would be normal. Now if she’s a lactating doe, she’s going to require about twice that amount of water for milk production.

Tammy: Okay. So your wether really needs to be drinking about a half a gallon of water a day?

Dr. Olcott: Exactly right. And, again, if we make that fresh and cool. Just like people, you know, you and I aren’t going to drink tepid old muddy water, but that cold water out the fountain looks real good and that certainly helps. Other things is they need salt out available to them at all times, so loose salt as opposed to block salt because it’s just hard to gnaw on a salt block to get the amount of salt that they need in their ration, so just loose salt, loose trace mineral salt available to them at all times and that helps them to make more urine and then the chlorine that’s in that seems to help to keep crystals from precipitating in the bladder as well.

Tammy: So where do you put that? Do you put it in their food or just do you just put…?

Dr. Olcott: Yeah a couple of ways. Number one, we’re hopefully we’re kind of feeding minimal amounts of grains anyhow because for the most part we just don’t need that, that’s a treat, it’s just not nutrition, so yes you can certainly add that in the feed. Normal levels of salt and feeds that are mixed by…like Purina goat chow will run about a half percent to one percent. For people who are feeding a lot of grain, we recommend that you raise that amount of salt in that ration up to about five percent and, again, we’re just trying to get more salt intake, more water intake, more dilute urine is what we’re trying to do.
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