Dr. Olcott: Okay. So we’ve got nutrition and then we said over-eating disease and tetanus were important and then number three for pygmy goats and on some commercial goats I put this one even higher, but this third one is this parasitism in goats which is just a huge problem. And with goats, I guess the big thing they don’t understand is that the particular worm that’s dangerous for goats is a blood-sucking worm called Haemonchus, which lives in the abomasum, the true stomach of the goat. And when people think of wormy animals, we kind of think of something whose hair’s really rough and they’re really skinny and they’re kind of pot-belly-looking and they got diarrhea and such and with Haemonchus that’s not the case at all. All this worm does is it just drinks blood and it’s very efficient at it. It’s efficient enough that if we get a high enough dose of worms inside them that those worms can consume about 16 ounces of blood a day, which just doesn’t take long to kill a goat.

Tammy: I know, especially a little pygmy goat.

Dr. Olcott: Exactly right. So what we see is these goats are nice and fat, healthy-looking goats one and day and it doesn’t happen overnight, but these goats have lost three-quarters of their blood volume and they’re in shock from blood loss and they’re dying. Now they never looked skinny to you and they never had diarrhea, they never showed any of those signs we think of with other animals, but they’re well on their way to dying from that disease, so that’s one that catches people off guard and it’s also one that kind of for first-time goat people, if I went and got a pygmy goat today and I never had pygmy goats and I put it in my backyard, it might take years before that would develop into a problem. We have to build up the level of parasites on the grass in my pasture before that would be a problem for my goats.
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