Oh dear, we discovered today that Onion and Garlic have a very high worm burden. As previously mentioned, goats are not good at developing an immunity to intestinal worms and as such, worming regimes need to rigorous and ever-evolving. The wormer used by the previous owner has been given every 2 months and as such, the worms had probably developed a bit of a resistance. We had asked our vet to do a faecal egg count on these two as soon as they arrived, just in case, and were rather glad we did.
We agreed that from now on, it is best to keep the girls inside for 2 weeks whilst the wormer hopefully does its job. This way they won’t shed hundreds of worm eggs on our grass which could then be eaten by the other animals. It’s a shame, as being indoors 24/7 means no grazing or browsing, neither does it help all the goats to start to get used to each other!!!
We will do another egg count in 2 weeks and fingers crossed.. all will be well!!!
And then.. (drum roll..) we can think about getting a billy goat on site – we have found one (just today in fact) who is 100% pure Boer, from a fabulous line and a youngster (so won’t mind only having a few girls to mate with..). BIG excitements!!