Tammy: And they wouldn’t mean it.

Dr. Olcott: That’s right. That’s right. They wouldn’t be fighting, but that would just be they get scared and raise their head up real quick.

Tammy: Even just playing they might do that.

Dr. Olcott: Well that’s right. So those are kind of the ins and out of it. If you are going to have a dehorned goat, the best time to do that is very shortly after birth. For regular goats we’d say by two weeks of age to take those horns off. Since pygmy goats grow a little faster than other goats, we’d say by a week of age have those horns removed and the reason that age is because then it’s just a small horn bud. Usually we’ll use an electrothermal treatment on that which just means we’d supply anesthesia in one way or another and then just burn the little area on the top of the head where that horn’s growing out of, so it’s a real minor little procedure whereas later on then it starts to be much more of a major procedure to take those horns off.

Tammy: Yeah as an adult it’s apparently pretty invasive right?

Dr. Olcott: Yeah it is. It’s pretty serious surgery.

Tammy: And sometimes do they grow back?

Dr. Olcott: Well and that’s why we say in regular goats two weeks and pygmies one week and the reason for that is that the incidence of what we call scurs is real high if you wait after those periods of time no matter how good of job you think you’ve done when you’re removing those horns. So yeah that’s why earlier is better because then you get…and scurs are not normal horns, they’re misshapen and kind of nasty-looking, so they’re not a desirable thing to have come back on you at all.
Previous Page (28)