We used to worry about it quite a lot. And then some of the newer drugs, particularly Ivermectin, came out in the early 80s and we really thought we had this thing just nailed and all of a sudden we can keep goat just literally just parasite-free, so we’d give them a dose of Ivermectin once a month, it used to be one of our schedules, and that would kill all their parasites and they’d be free, they’d pick them up on the pasture, gradually hit them again in a month and we’re free of parasites and life looked pretty good for a while there and then what happened was Haemonchus started to develop drug resistance to that particular dewormer the same way it was resistant to some of those older products that we used to use and so then all of a sudden we were kind of back in the same old rut. Now since then there have been a number of new drugs that have come out and sequentially Haemonchus has managed to become resistant to every drug that has ever been developed to date and always will. But the worms win. If we go toe-to-toe with them just using chemicals, the worm’s going to win every time, so that’s not the answer. People looking at that came up with things like this famacha program and what that consists of is just a simple way of basically measuring the packed cell volume of the goat because that’s what this worm does is drink blood. And, in fact, we mentioned that it can drink…with a heavy infection you can lose about 16 ounces of blood a day in an adult goat, so it’s an impressive amount of blood loss that occurs.
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