My life has been a whirl wind over the past few months. I was always told as you get older life moves faster and I have been living in a world where I am not the exception, but the norm. I felt like it was all I could do to simply get by the past few weeks, just cleaning the barn and making sure that everyone had water, hay and feed. This meant that some of the more important although, not daily tasks were being pushed to the wayside. This came to a head today, I was supposed to go work on some projects my husband and I need to accomplish by the end of the week, but my farm was calling out to me. It was warm, although it was rainy, and I needed to take care of some things! I started by doing a deep clean of my barn which included cleaning out my long overdue buck stall. I try to strip my buck stall once a week, but I simply had not gotten to it for at least two weeks and the amount of hay they had pulled out of their hay feeder was almost laughable. Once I got my barn completely stripped and rebedded, I filled all of my waters after scrubbing them and made some minor repairs I had been putting off, and I filled my mineral, kelp and baking soda feeder.
This like many other things in my life got me thinking about the last time I checked all of my goats FAMACHA scores, so I wrestled everyone down to check their membranes and found that Turbo, Ivy and Zoey were pretty pale, by my standards. I keep a pretty good eye on everyone's membrane colors, so I know Ivy runs paler normally than Moots does and that Zoey always struggles with parasites. Unfortunately, it does seem like Turbo is following in Zoey's footsteps in being susceptible to anemia from a high worm load. Zoey is due the last week in March, so I did not want to deworm her with a dewormer due to potential fetal side effects, so I opted to give her a dose of red cell, and watch her closely. For Ivy and Turbo, I chose to treat them with my first line of defense, Valbazen in combination with Red Cell therapy. I think the combination of the very wet and warm winter that we have had is lending itself to higher tripartite loads and less die off, which is why we seem to have a few challenges in my small herd. I hope that this round of treatment is all everyone needs to bounce back, but I will keep you posted. I think this highlights the importance of ensuring no matter how busy life gets, it is still your responsibility as the goat owner and herd manager to make time to take care of the non daily tasks that are essential for your goat's health and well being.
