Tammy: Well that was my next question. Actually I’ve head of this and I’ve actually gotten one person to say that she knows this is really true and a lot of people who are considering pygmy goats as pets want to know if you can keep them in your house. Did you ever have an owner come in who’s got a primarily house pygmy goat?

Dr. Olcott: I don’t know of any with primarily house pygmy goat owners, but I guess I don’t know of any pygmy goat owners whose goat hasn’t been in their house purposely on one occasion or another. When the weather gets real nasty they bring them inside. They’re easily socialized to humans, they bond well with humans, and you would want to keep houseplants out of their reach inside the house because many of them are toxic and it takes goats a while to figure that out, sometimes fatally. And I have had people that made little diapers for their goats and stuff like that when they had them in the house so you can solve that problem as well.

Tammy: Okay. Tell me a little bit about what people need to do when they have a pygmy goat. I mean you talked about that spoiled pygmy goats are probably a big part of the problem. Tell me a little bit about what would be the proper care that they’d need to have.

Dr. Olcott: Okay. And I guess they kind of…the spoiled aspect…the way people typically spoil their goats, bring them in the house, they spoil them, but that’s not detrimental to their health.

Tammy: Right.

Dr. Olcott: But the big problem that we see clinically with pygmy goats is people like to feed them and feed them and feed them and they like to feed them really sweet, highly-nutritious things, cake and bread and cookies and sweet feed and on down the line, and unfortunately, the show goat, pygmy goat world seems to kind of foster that concept as well that they…
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