Tammy: That’s a lot.

Dr. Olcott: And what the famacha consists of is just a…And there’s a little photograph of five different stages and we score that anywhere from a one to a five, the one being the reddest color and a five being white just like a sheet of paper. To look at the correct spot – and it’s real important that you always look at the same spot on the goat – just take their top eyelid, push the eyeball back in the socket just a little bit and roll down the bottom eyelid and then you’ll be able to see that inner membrane of the eye or the conjunctiva and that’s one that’s very consistent in terms of its color. Like we said, a one should be just a reddish color, a two should be a good pink color, a three starts turning kind of a pale pink, and usually about that three is the time when we start to go ahead and deworm goats would be at that point. Anything that’s a four, which is very pale pink, and a five, which is white like a sheet of paper, absolutely emergency deworm those dewormers that you think will work effectively on that particular goat.

Tammy: Because those are signs of anemia?

Dr. Olcott: Those are signs of anemia. That’s correct. Now one other sign that you may see on one and they’re going to be a four or five on the scale that it kind of warns you, sometimes they’ll get what we call bottle jaw, which means they get a soft, kind of fluid-feeling swelling underneath their jaws between the two bones of the bottom jaw, the mandible, and that will pit on pressure and what that means is if you squeeze on it, it’s kind of like bread dough, you leave an imprint of your fingers on that site.
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