Tammy: Kind of like a weird goiter.

Dr. Olcott: Fair enough. It’s a little bit higher than a goiter would be, but fair enough. And what that tells you is that animal’s lost a lot of protein along with the red cells so it can’t keep its blood in circulation anymore the way it should.

Tammy: So instead of worming regularly, what you recommend owners do is follow this program and to check the blood supply to keep the worms from becoming resistant?

0:35:00.2
Dr. Olcott: That’s exactly correct because the more times we use that chemical product the more likely resistance is and the faster it develops, so we’re trying to kind of stretch out our treatments just as far as we can.

Tammy: And you said now the person who has one or two pygmy goats isn’t going to see it as often as somebody with a herd right?

Dr. Olcott: That’s correct.

Tammy: And why is that?

Dr. Olcott: Well it’s a matter of how many parasites that animal is eating during the course of a day. Now the transmission of this particular thing is the eggs are passed in the feces of the goat, they land on pastures, after four to five days they hatch, it turns into a small little worm, of course, that you can’t see that wriggles around in grass and dirt, it goes through another maturation phase, and then what they do is climb up little blades of grass and particularly in the morning time when there’s some dew on the grass is their most successful time of doing that. So they’ll kind of climb up to a maximum of 4 inches on a blade of grass as the dew’s there and then when the dew starts to go away later in the day they start to climb back down, they’ll get down in the underneath grass and stay in that kind of moist environment for the remainder of the day and then repeat that the following night as dew falls and on and on. Previous Page (20)