Russ: What do I do to keep them healthy? Well for one thing, we make absolutely sure that we keep them with clean, fresh water. That’s one of the most important things. You can’t just leave them with a stagnant bucket of water because things gather there. The second thing that you do is you follow a religious worming schedule, which is once every three months you give them a shot of worming liquid, 1 cc, which isn’t very much and it’s not very expensive. Make sure that they get their annual shots and other than that, they are a very hearty, healthy bunch and we don’t have any trouble with them. They’re just always fine. Sometimes they hurt their leg; sometimes they hurt their foot or something like that. We usually just let them get over it.

Tammy: But I understand that their legs can be pretty delicate though.

Russ: Well they do hurt themselves sometimes because they like to butt each other sometimes and we did have one buck that had a broken leg from another big buck whacking him but it was more less an accident.

Tammy: I see.

Russ: Sometimes because we get lazy and we don’t trim their hooves when we should, one of them will start limping and then we know right away we got to go pick out its foot and cut its hoof, which is a simple thing to do. But there really isn’t much that can go wrong with a goat. There are diseases and things like that, but we’ve never had any and we have a pretty closed herd now. Whenever we get a new goat, we sort of quarantine it and put it by itself for
0:30:01.3 four or five days before we introduce it to the herd and sometimes the herd won’t be very nice to the new goat for a little while. Previous Page (178)