Females, the same kind of story goes. When they get late pregnant, their nutritional requirements from a caloric standpoint go up. When they start lactating, especially if they have two or three kids nursing on them, then just like a lactating woman, it’s almost a hay day; you can eat all you want to eat and not gain a single pound because you’re producing milk out of all of that. So those would be some critical points in their life cycles. The other thing to worry about is the balance of that ration that they’re getting and one of the things that goats just don’t tolerate very well in terms from a mineral standpoint, is getting too much phosphorus in their diet and things that come from…A generalization, things that come from grain are always very high in phosphorus and very low in calcium. Grasses tend to be pretty balanced in terms of calcium-phosphorus ratio. Alfalfa has more calcium than it has phosphorus in it. But the dangerous feeds…And here we’re talking about obstructive urolithiasis…The dangerous feeds would be those that have a lot of phosphorus in them and that means bread, cake, grain, crackers, any of those substances are things that would have very high levels of phosphorus and very low levels of calcium.

Tammy: Okay. So the calcium’s not what’s causing the problem, it’s the phosphorus.

Dr. Olcott: Yeah the phosphorus is the big problem. In fact, the most common stone they get is made out of magnesium and ammonium and phosphorus are the three components of it.

Tammy: Talk a little bit about…So it sounds like what you’re saying is that people need to make sure that they’re food is high in calcium and low in phosphorus?
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