So when a goat goes out and eats a blade of grass that has one worm one it, if that’s all it ate for that day, then it would take months and months and months before that goat could develop enough worms to cause problems, but if they go out and eat grass that’s heavily contaminated with those larvae they could very quickly within a matter of one to two weeks develop a fatal infection with parasites.

Tammy: Okay. And, again, it’s because of the fecal matter that’s on the pasture.

Dr. Olcott: That’s exactly it. It’s a concentration effect. One of our produces down here has about…oh they’ve got about 150 or so pygmies, for instance, on small acreage and yeah they have problems with parasites under those circumstances and pretty heavy problems at some times of the year, but most of our people that have, again, that one or two, it’s not a big problem for those people.

Tammy: Okay. Now what other sort of parasites do people need to look out for?

Dr. Olcott: Probably the next most important one to a Haemonchus would be a parasite that affects mostly just young goats, kids, and that’s one called coccidia and that’s one that they pick and with this one they can pick up very small quantities of it and then it gets inside and when we eat Heamonchus we had one worm we ate produced one adult worm in the stomach. In this case, one coccidia goes inside and produces tens of thousands more coccidia inside the intestine of the goat, so it’s kind of more like a bacterial infection in that sense where you just need a real small dose and no immunity and you develop a huge problem in terms of that disease. Once they’ve been exposed to it for a while or once they have the clinical disease, normal goats would develop immunity to it and then they’d be resistant to it for the rest of their lives, so we don’t see it in adult goats but we see it in young goats, often young goats nursing their mothers or goats that have just been weaned so they’ve got a little bit of weaning stress on them as well.
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