Tammy: They’re pretty porky-looking aren’t they?

Dr. Olcott: They like them porky.

Tammy: Yeah.

Dr. Olcott: Unfortunately, it’s just like people that porkiness is a bad thing. That’s not a healthy situation. What we see in goats as a result of that is things that happen as we get a lot of a disease called obstructive urolithiasis, which means that the urethra on males, either castrated or intact, gets blocked up by crystals, which keeps them from urinating and that’s one of our toughest to deal with diseases let’s say. Other things we’ll see is on females when they become pregnant and they get late pregnant, if they have twins or more than that, triplets or quadruplets like pygmies commonly do, then we see pregnancy toxemia in those goats just because their liver’s filled with their fat just like the outside of their body is and they just can’t metabolize things as efficiently as they need to.

Tammy: Okay. Tell me a little bit about what you think that people…You know you talked about sweets and I guess when you’re talking about sweet feed you’re talking about alfalfa?

Dr. Olcott: Well sweet feeds would be more things like feeds with molasses added to them, but people do feed alfalfa certainly as well.

Tammy: What do you recommend they do feed?

Dr. Olcott: Well a lot of it depends on the life stage of the goat. Young growing goats are just like young growing people and when I’m doing nutrition I like to use human examples because people can kind of relate to that easily. So during young rapid growth, it’s almost
0:10:00.2 impossible to over-feed from a caloric standpoint a young growing goat, but where we really run into problems is then let’s say we keep one as a pet, it’s a male, we castrate him, keep him as a pet, well now he’s no longer growing and now what he’s doing is just starting to become a little bit more sedentary, his metabolism is slowed down, and just like a middle-aged man, they start to easily gain weight on that same diet that before they were lean and trim on. Previous Page (5)