Hi everybody, well, welcome along to this webinar this afternoon on common health problems in goats. I thought we'd start by taking a look at the outline of the UK goat industry and then briefly move on to our approach to goat cases. I'll look a little bit in detail at some of the various elements of goat herd health planning.

Focus on these four areas. You'll see I've mentioned disc budding there. We did actually do a disc budding webinar on webinar that's just over a year ago, so a lot more information will be available on that recording.

And there's also a publication which I'll signpost you to later on in the presentation. Then we're gonna look at providing practical treatment and control options for some common diseases in goats. So the UK goat sector is increasing year on year.

We're something like 108,000 goats in the UK at the moment, and that's based on 2019 stats. Although this is likely a significant underestimation, partly because we know a lot of goats are kept in twos, threes, fours as pets and probably aren't registered as they should be. What we do know is that around about 100 holdings in the UK are registered to have more than 100 goats, but of those 100 units, they contribute more than 60% of the national herd.

So the UK goat sector is broken up into these component parts, and roughly speaking, the dairy commercial units comprise something like 60% of the total UK national herd, totaling over 60,000 animals. That's split across 50 to 60 true commercial units with an average unit size of something like 600, but the range is very large, something from 50 to 60 animals right the way up to over 5000. The meat sector is growing all the time.

Certainly over the last 5 years it has been the largest, sort of the increased section within the, UK sector. Something like 17,000 commercial go goat now being kept. The fibre sector is smaller, something like 6000.

The main breed involved being Angoras. And then the rest, sort of a, a sort of amalgamation of these various sectors. We've got the pedigree and show sectors, smallholders, and this will include things like petting zoos, city farms and things like that.

So how do we approach our goat cases? I'm gonna try and go through a couple of the pointers that I employ and hopefully they might be of use to to those of you out. Goats that you want really sociable, and that can at times makes them quite frustrating patients to deal with.

They really crave stimulation, and environmental enrichment will really help these guys. They're prey species, so they do need something to hide behind or under. And bear in mind they're really agile climbers.

So, that means when you're looking at the environment in which you keep these goats, you need to be aware of what things they can put their heads through, put their legs through, make sure it's goat-friendly, and these guys aren't going to, cause themselves injuries. I've found here vocalisation and that's largely because if you're unfamiliar with goats or you have goatkeepers who are quite new to handling and holding on to goats. They make a lot of noises and certainly when you try and restrain or examine or take a temperature, they can often screal out and it sounds very like a human child screaming.

If you're unfamiliar with that, that can be quite distressing. So it's always worth a conversation to start with to make sure, both owner and yourselves are aware of the kind of noises which might come out of these creatures. Go to browsers, and they've got the reputation of being quite fussy.

I'm not sure that's totally well deserved. I would certainly buy into the fact that they're quite wasteful. And what I mean by that is the ration you put in front of them, they will sort.

They will pick out the bit they really want. They'll usually go for the high quality goodies, and they'll leave what they don't think they want, and that can be deemed as being quite fussy, but I think it's, they're probably just being quite. Abby eaters.

But why that's significant is if they're leaving large amounts of food and it's wasteful, it's important not to recycle that back into future bedding, or future feeds, because they'll simply throw it out again or if it's used as bedding and they poke through it, you could encourage or increase the risk of hygiene-related diseases, things like conidosis and things. We do condition score our goats, but it's a slightly different way around of doing it from you might expect in other ruminant species. Noticeably cattle, we've got quite, well-known and standardised approach, because goats don't have a lot of subcutaneous fat and they tend to delay their fat abdominally.

There's not a lot of point in using a lumber scoring system on its own. Instead, we try and sort of add in different scoring systems. So take the stern, for example, and combine that with number to try and standardise our approach and some great diagrams showing you how to do this scoring, in some of the reference books that I'll, I'll reference at the end for you.

Restraint, probably requires a little bit of that explanation. Goats, generally speaking, don't want to be held or restrained. I say don't really want to be turned upside down like we do with sheep.

So wherever possible, if you're dealing with small numbers, you'll find that they'll probably be quite happy or certainly happier. Being held on a, on a lead rope, and a neck collar. If you're doing some feet, for example, you can find picking up 1 ft at a time is relatively easy.

Try and save your backs and often stand on tables or load benches quite happily, and maybe a bale of straw, and it means less far for you guys to, to bend down. Weight, obviously really variable depending on the breed that you're dealing with, ranging anything really from 60 to 100 kg, some of some of these adult dairy goats, and even adult pygmy goats can get up to 2030 kg. And they can live for a long period of time.

So these guys, you're often going to be interacting with throughout, many years within the practise. This is an example here on the right-hand side of pygmy goat Hugo, who was well into his late teens when we finally had to laze him. So now we move on to have a look at some of the goat herd health planning points that we've described.

Because of the multiple ways in which goats are kept within the UK, you probably do need to have a specific herd health plan for the unit. Now that doesn't mean you need to have pages and pages of information. And there's going to be a lot of common essential elements that you can hinge upon.

We often start off a plan, looking at something like the, the welfare provision or 5 freedoms and use this as a framework to sort of hinge the bits that we need around on the unit. So I would have suggested that probably essential elements for most goat farms will include some kind of section on infectious disease control. Probably something on buying in policy and biosecurity, maybe some quarantine, if they're breeding animals, something on neonatal care, particularly colostrum management and how we wean and feed our young kids.

And almost certainly if they've got any kind of outdoor space or grazing, something to do with, with worm control, plus or minus liver fluke if you're in a fluke area. And I would suggest that probably forms the basis of most herd health plans. And then it's a question of looking at the unit that you've got and adding in the additional bits that you might feel are necessary.

So, units with particular lameness problems can have a lameness plan, larger commercial dairy units might benefit from mastitis plan, nutrition, basically, whatever else that unit might require. I try and do an annual review on most of my goat farms, and I find that a really useful way to make this document dynamic. As I said before, it doesn't need to be a big document, but you can sort of chop and change, and by no means do all those elements need to be reviewed each year.

But if you've had a lame problem, you've resolved that over the last 12 months, it's time to move on, review the progress, and maybe look at something else. And, and these things will chop and change in your priority list. But most clients really value that feedback.

We do, of course, have some resources for you on our Goat Veterinary Society website. I'll signpost and, and talk about this a little bit more as we go through the presentation, but something to bear in mind. And if you're dealing with any of the larger commercial dairy goat units, they'll often have subscription to the Goat Farmers Dairy Assurance scheme.

And of course, within the UK, the Milking Goat Association can be a great fountain of knowledge. We'll move on now to have a look at the prescribing of medicines with regard to herd health planning. And in the UK context, you'll probably be aware that most medicines that we use are unlicensed for goats.

Goats in the UK are still classed as food-producing animals, and we don't have any kind of dereliction like we do with horses for subscribing our goats to becoming pets and not entering the food chain. That means that cascade requirements will always have to be applied, and are important. And when you're dealing with milking goats, for example, the implications with regard to, milk and meat withholds can be quite significant.

I've highlighted in particular the disbudding and chronic pain, next to cascade requirements there. And that's because, often with our increasing goat population within the UK we're getting a lot of these pet goats, and they're often living far longer. They're encountering disease problems such as osteoarthritis, which requires some form of long-term chronic pain relief, .

And the sort of usual day in, day out, ruminant drug that we might use, things like meloxicam may not be the most appropriate, and the temptation might be to move across to, to an equine medication like phenylbutasone, which doesn't have an MRL, but I'll I'll hopefully go through to explain that there might be alternatives to that and ways of staying closer to the Cascade principle. Currently in the UK we've got about 14 licenced products for using goats. Unfortunately, they kind of include things which may not be that useful on our day to day vetting jobs dealing with common goat diseases.

They include things like sterile water, intravenous fluids. We do now have a licenced worming product. This is Eriummectin, marketed as Eronex Multi.

The downside to this product is that it is a pon product. And what we know with poron products and goats, for dealing with internal gut worms, is that the metabolism and the uptake by the skin will often lead to And underdosing. Great from an ectoparasite point of view, which we can use that product quite safely, but I would suggest it needs a little bit of caution and awareness if we're using it for internal gut parasite control.

But we'll talk a little bit more about that as we get on to a later bit. We do have now two antibiotics licenced for use in goats in the UK. One of those sadly is a fluoroquinolone, which, with responsible use of medications and antibiotics, particularly, might not be a first choice option.

And the other is a tetracycline in a topical spray. So not hugely useful, with our, our day to day diseases. And we do have a good number of vaccines, some of which are, are highly relevant, particularly the only vaccine to the larger commercial dairy units.

We sadly don't have a licenced product in the UK available for clostridial disease and we'll touch on that in the next slide or two. Just a note of caution not to use timicosin, the drug found in Mycoil or Apatil, does, does cause death in goats. So I talked about vaccinations a little bit and the fact that clostridial disease might be something we want to think about.

Well, goats immune responses to vaccines can be quite variable. There's a great paper available in the Goat Veterinary Society journal, which is available to the GPS members by Houghton in 2005, and it sort of describes the way the goat responds to vaccines. And it's partly because they've evolved as browsers, rather than grazes.

And what they tend to do is not mount a very good immune response. The more things or antigenic stimuluses you throw at them. So the greater number of antigenic stimulus the goat is presented with one, in one time, the lesser the immune response that you actually get.

I've mentioned on the previous slide, we have 4 licenced vaccines currently available in the UK. We use them, use other vaccines off licence and in combination, but because of the way the goats respond to these vaccines, and their immunity that they develop to it, the duration of immunity is often less than we would expect in other species, and it's certainly significantly less cholesterol transfer, via, maternity derived antibodies, to much of these vaccines that we use. And that has quite significant impact when we consider about, consider some of our units and high-risk environments they pose to kids, particularly for clostridial disease.

The big two, diseases that are worth considering to vaccinate on nearly every goat farm I would suggest would be Clostridia, because it's such a, an ever-present risk when we have dietary change and the environment. And also pastorella, particularly where I'm from in the north of the country, pastor can be a big problem, at turnout and turn in with temperature changes and fluctuations. It's another present threat.

To develop that vaccination theme a little bit further, we've said a couple of times now that Clostridia is a significant disease to goats, and goats are very susceptible to it, particularly Clostridium perfringence type D, whereas unlike our sheep, where they tend to get the pulp kidney scenario in goats, it's much more prevalent to find this enterotoxemia and sudden death scenario. The big risk factor for this, will be diet change. So in our more intensive units where we're chopping and changing diets quite regularly, or the chop and change from weeding through to some kind of growing nut, you can cause or can get very large, outbreaks of clotricular disease, and without vaccination in there to control this, you can have quite a few deaths.

The acute cases, if you if you happen to catch them early enough to see this, present with marked depression, often a very high temperature, a watery scour with often blood and, and mucosal cast within it. Quite often abdominal discomfort, and you'll see them kicking out and things. Treatment can be quite tricky, particularly if you don't get in there early enough.

And I would tend to use an intravenous antibiotic, as soon as possible. I tend to use a tetracycline intravenously, and then a penicillin, intramuscularly combined therapy. Non-steroidal is very important, but to bring that temperature down, provide some pain relief, but also to try and, combat some of the, toxins involved in enterotoxinia.

Intravenous fluid therapy is essential. There's massive amounts of, of fluid lost in the scour, and we do need to replace that as quickly as possible. In the absence of knowing what electrolyte disturbances you might have, I tend to go straight in with normal saline and ASAP and hope that the kidneys, if I'm early enough, aren't too badly damaged, to correct any acid-based deficits.

Vitamin B supplementation will certainly help to try and sort of put back some of the lost iainnase alteration within the ruin capacity. So you'll find hopefully less secondary bacterial leakage from the ruminal contents and bacterial transportation. So vitamin B certainly can be helpful in these cases.

We're looking to try and prevent clostridial disease as much as possible. And that, based on the principles that we've just discussed in terms of vaccinations and the immunity goats produced to vaccines, is going to be using a vaccine with as fewer component parts as possible. The one that we would tend to use in the UK is Lamyvac.

In other parts of the world, I believe it does have a licence for using goats, but sadly not here in the UK at the moment. We know that the immunity generated to this vaccine is slightly less than we would expect in sheep. And most low-risk units would probably survive OK with a six-monthly booster interval.

The more intenses of the unit or the higher the risk or the more frequent diet changes, the more regularly you're likely to have to boost, and certainly quite a few of the larger commercial units, dairy units in particular, will vaccinate with Ava every 3 months. Cholesterol transfers is also quite short-lived, of immunity here. You certainly won't get anything like the 12 weeks suggested that you get in lambs, probably closer to 2 weeks.

And that means we're having to look at starting the primary vaccination course for our young kids nice and early, probably something like at the 2 weeks stage, and complete the primary course. That's important. The second dose is due 4 weeks after that first.

Without it, you'll often find the duration of immunity is even shorter and certainly the immune response they're able to mount, is reduced. OK, if we have a look now at internal parasite control, I've mentioned before that goats are browsers and they tend to evolve with this evolutionary immune response, which has led to them not really developing any kind of age-dependent immunity, as sheep or cattle do to gut parasites and particularly helmins. They also do get this peripartuate rie similar to seen in sheep.

And that's led to some strategic dosing of pregnant toes ahead of kidding to try and reduce worm egg output onto grazing land. Because of this no age dependent immunity in goats, you're just as likely to have worms causing diarrhoea and significant disease in adults as you would be in young animals. So if you're presented with a scouring adult goat, please do have internal parasites on your radar.

Now, we do have one licenced and mintic product available within the UK now. It is an ML unfortunately, in a poor on formulation as I discussed, which may not be the most appropriate, method of application for internal gut parasite controlling goats. It's great from an ectoparasite point of view, as we've discussed, and we'll, we'll go on to talk a bit about more about.

But for internal parasites, we might find that the risk of underdosing is quite high, which has led to, often off-license use of products, but we do run into issues with milk and meat withholds. With this, necessary use of analmintics because of no age dependent immunity. We do find increasing levels of worm resistance in goats, and you'll find it's often to give a larger dose rate, Mostly because the goats metabolise the products much faster than sheep or, or cattle, and they require higher doses to, to reach therapeutic index.

So that often relates to a doubling of the sheep dose rate depending on the products you're using. Levaazole would be the cautionary note on that table, on the screen right now. There is a low safety toxic threshold with Levamazole, and I certainly wouldn't want to use it, any more than say 1.5 times the sheep dose rate, and I would probably limit its use to adults, or, or fit yearling, goats.

The risk of overdose and toxic levels being reached in younger animals is quite high. Very important to have accurate body weights with these drugs. Management strategies really come into play, with our worm control and wormer programmes because we're trying all the time to reduce the amount of, of worm product that we use to try and reduce the amount of resistance that builds up within the population.

And that's a big reason really why a lot of the larger commercial units will house all year round to avoid the need to have to worm their goats, and to avoid any necessary milk and meat withhold that could be applied. Now, obviously, every unit's going to be different and gonna have different management strategies that could be employed, but they're likely to need to involve rotation of passages, being able to house the periods of time and trying to identify those in the group who carry the largest parasite burden and selectively treat those whilst bearing husband in the population. And it, and being able to apply for the Scots principles is, is just applicable to goats.

But, at the end of this presentation, there will be an email address which I'm more than happy to receive emails on if you have specific or, individual management strategy questions, and we can see if we can come up with some solutions. Dis budding, I said at the beginning, we're not going to talk too much about disbudding in this presentation because we've done a webinar on that just last year. And there is also an article, co-written by myself and GBS colleague John Matthews, which was published in practise last year, in November.

So there's an awful lot more information in those two sources. But suffice to say, disbugging, is a mutilation in the UK and legally can only be done by veterinary surgeons. But it's probably pertinent to ask the question, do we actually need to disbud at all?

Not all breeds are commonly disbudded. Some of the reasons why we might just bud is because of how we keep them. So in the more intensive units, we're keeping our goats much closer together in relatively close confinement, often in with pen architecture which could lend itself to the backward facing horns being caught and therefore leaving injuries or potentially causing injuries to themselves or others.

It's not a good idea to keep horned and horned less goats together. Those with horns know they have horns. They know how to use them.

I generally see probably 1 or 2 injuries a year where a horned animal has attacked a horn less, and it's often not necessarily malicious because you end up with quite nasty goring or other injuries. A lot of people will ask why we haven't got poled goats. We do have poled goats within, the population, but the more you breed those poed goats together, the gene for poll is linked to intersects, and unfortunately, the, the intersect gene wins out and you end up with a non-breeding animals as a result.

So the essentials of disbudding, we're, we're disbudding very young kids. These are neonates, 2 to 7 days old, and unlike calves, they have very large horn buds which grow very, very quickly, and very large relative to the size of the skull and a thin skull like that. Which means we're having to remove them very early to avoid some of the complications which discussed in the webinar and and the article already discussed.

I would try and avoid de hauling if at all possible. It's invasive, hemorrhagic, traumatic, and quite stressful. And unless it's a dire, emergency, probably best avoided.

I certainly only go into this if you, if you know, what you're doing and always seek advice if you're not sure. The anaesthesia and analgesia, specifically for dis budding, can be quite, tricky because we're dealing with not only neonates, but we're also dealing with, food-producing animals with limited legal options. And so we're looking at cascade use again.

We do have, of course, inhalational, anaesthetic agents, which probably aren't that suitable to the field scenario, but if you're having individuals in the hospital environment, then that might be useful. There are intravenous single agents, things like propofol, but they don't have MRLs set, so probably not a legal option, if we're trying to stick with, cascade principles. Local infiltration with local anaesthetic agent, the local anaesthetic agents have a very low safety toxic threshold, in goats, and we've got two nerve roots to try and block off.

And we're going to have to use quite a significant amount in a very tiny goat, and we're gonna get very close to toxic levels, so probably not a suitable way of, anaesthetizing for disbudding, if you're dealing with, with many cases. The alpha2s have quite prolonged recovery, which has a significant complication risk of hypothermia. So it's definitely something to be aware of so that you can mitigate those risks going forward.

This is an example protocol of something that I use for disbudding those goat kids in the field, ketamine, diazine, and butterphenol in combination, given intravenously, works really nicely. There are obviously risks and complications associated with long recovery, but as I said before, if you can mitigate against those risks, then you can, hopefully do this in a safe, and controlled environment with, with minimal problems. As I said before, a lot more information, on this in the disbudding webinar.

The procedure very quickly is to clip the hair away from the anaesthetized goat kid horn buds, apply the hotir evenly for as little time as possible in a circular, even pressure, movement. Remove the bud from the centre. There's very little point in leaving that bud behind.

So flick it out, it can only act to the knives an infection really if left behind, so better out altogether. I tend to like to apply a cold water swab immediately after removing the bud to, cool down the skull nice and quickly, reduce the risk of an aquatary injury to the brain underneath, and then apply a topical spray, then additional analgesia, something like a meloxicam injection, castration if you're doing billies at this point, and then return to recovery. There will be some GPS training coming on disbanding Goat Kids, using some, frozen cadaver, and hopefully, once, face to face meetings are back up and running post COVID, we'll be able to advertise this and get these courses running for anybody who's interested.

So we've looked at some of the health planning sections now, and we're gonna move on to look at some of the common goat diseases. Now, obviously, there are huge amounts of diseases and treatments out there. I've just had to go through and pick some common ones.

And if people have questions or specific questions on other diseases, I'm more than happy to try and answer those via email if you wish. So I started off with diarrhoea, multiple causes of diarrhoea, as you would expect in both the young and the adult goat. And I've chosen coccidosis to start with.

Largely similar to what we would expect in terms of coccidiosis disease in both sheep and cattle, with an infection range typically from 4 weeks old right through to 5 months. But given that goats don't really produce any age-related immunity, you can still get adult goats with coccidiosis disease, although there does seem to be a little greater, resistance to infection or resistance to clinical signs in adults, than in the kids. There are well over 20 species of Ari associated, they are found commonly in goats, but they're not all associated with disease, and that's the same as in many of the other species that you'll be familiar with dealing with.

And the types of pathology that it's causing are quite similar, leading to the characteristic clinical signs of, of scour or intermittent scour, smus may include some, some blood within that, faeces which is voided. And variable inflammatory damage depending on which sections of the gut it's actually affecting, and some gut wall thickening, which can be, quite easily palpated, by a postmortem if you've got sections of gut where you've got quite widespread haemorrhage within the gut lining, and then palpably some thickening of that gut wall, which is quite characteristic of Boboxy. Diagnosis, a mixture of clinical signs, faecal osis count is obviously gonna be helpful.

But without speciation, it, it can be tricky to know whether you've generally got, pathologic, species of coxy there or not. Although clearly, you know, a high EI count, clinical signs and classic postmortem finding would be, highly suggestive. Differentials would include things like cryptosporidium, E.

Coli, dietary scour, perhaps. Treatment and control, very similar to what you would expect in other ruminant species. And although we don't have any licenced anticcoccidials for using goats, we do use the sheep and cattle, treatments routinely and relatively safely.

Control really centres around the fact that it's still a hygiene-related disease. So being sure not to turn all that wasted. Ration into bedding and enco and sort of try and discourage the goats from eating the bedding, making sure the feed faces and water troughs are all.

Excuse me, cleaned and, and emptied and, and refreshed regularly. And using the treatments if and when you need to, sometimes it can be useful to have a strategic plan to, to dose members of the group in intensive units, just ahead of clinical disease showing it, and then we can try and get ahead of the disease in, in that manner. There has been quite a lot of speculation that we're seeing resistance now to the, the Coxan product.

We don't have anything like the same level of reported resistance cases to baitco. So that may influence our treatment choices going forward. And dose rates, with the increasing level of resistance reported of the Coxan, people have used, 1 to 1.5 times current she doses, but are still widely using sheep dose rates for Baycock.

Have a look at some skin conditions next. Again, very common, call for inquiry to our Gove Society inquiry line. And obviously, common things are common.

One of the top skin conditions that you'll see is ectoparasites, and the main one for, for goats would be chooptes. Reasonably easy to diagnose, it being a surface, dwelling skin mite, and so skin scrapes, combined with lesion distribution and clinical signs, plus or minus the elimination of other causes depending on, on the unit that you're dealing with is often enough to, to diagnose. A little warning on skin scrape, taking and location.

These, goats are really pruritic, and the lesion distribution is classically the back of the, the pasttons. Sometimes across the top of the tail head, the back of the neck, and along the, the ventrum. And these lesions can be really quite thick and, and crusty, and often the mites have tended to move away from the site of the actual lesion.

So skin scrapes and the classic edge of the lesion area might be unrewarding. So if you take those skin scrapes a little bit further away from the lesion itself, so for example, if you're doing a pasttern, slightly further up and perhaps, slightly more dorsally rather than ventrally facing, you'll find that you get, a, a greater chance of, of hitting some of those mics. As they scurry across the surface and picking that up.

Treatment. Well, we do have a licenced ectoparasite drug now for goats, the epprinomectin. It isn't specifically licenced for the use of Coote control, but does work quite nicely, in its control method when applied topically.

The trick here, I think, is to, is to actually prepare the lesions and the goats before you actually apply the drug. I wrote an article for this in the Goat Vet Society journal for 2019, so it's well worth having a look at that, if you have access to it as a GPS member. But essentially sort of scrubbing and disinfecting those affected areas to try to remove all the crust and things and then surface skin disinfection with something like chlorhexidine can be really useful.

And then thoroughly dry the area. A lot of these goats are quite familiar or used to the showing and they've been used to sort of hair dryers. So they actually quite like it having the area dried with a hairdryer, and then apply your ectoparasite treatment.

With the epinemectin, you must be careful or aware of not underdosing. So you will want an accurate body weight and try and give the full dose of the worming products. I thought these kind of cases like to apply the whole dose to a cotton wool swab and then literally pat down and soak the affected lesions until they're visibly wet.

And I'm confident that those affected areas have been well treated. And then the remainder of my soaked cotton wool wad is then applied down the spine as per the manufacturer's directions to make sure that go goat is getting its entire, dose of treatment. These cases should be isolated, and need careful follow-up, to make sure that we are getting the treatment response that we require.

Occasionally, if the lesions are quite long-standing, you will require secondary antibiotic treatment to, to treat underlying skin infections, and pain relief is often quite, quite useful in the early stages, to try and combat sort of the cracked skin and the itchiness associated with it. Look at Capri arthritis encephalitis. The labs would have us believe that this is probably quite under diagnosed within the goat population.

It's a lentivirus, a retroviida similar to Madivina in sheep, and we know that transmission occurs primarily through the ingestion of infected clot and milk, also through contact and aerosol transition and, and also translately. The frustrating thing about this disease really is it's variable incubation period, and the fact that we get these asymptomatic and later carriers, which means If you're unfortunate enough to identify a case, you know, how widespread has it got within the herd and how practical is it gonna be to try and identify these individuals and put some kind of control measure in place. It causes a multitude of different syndromes, and goats being goats, they can get 12, or maybe none of these various presentations.

And it can be quite a sort of diagnosticians minefield to try and work out what might be going on. The arthritis syndrome, if I try and break them into bits, classically affects slightly older goats. They're usually over 12 months of age and upwards.

And the, the, the first sight to be affected is usually the carpus, joints, and then gradually will, it will affect other joints as well. These joints they don't typically have this sort of joint feel to them. They're not usually hot.

The swelling is not usually soft. It's quite hard for the bony change. And actually when you actually palpate the joint itself, in the standing or immobile animal, they're not that painful.

It's when the joints are actually being moved or the animals trying to move that you see this sort of pain response. We do get an encephalitis syndrome that's classically in younger, younger kids, for a couple of weeks to a couple of months of age, and we get sort of neurological depression, and you often see in coordination and as it progresses, they become quite uncoordinated and developed to, to paresis as well. There are some official pneumonia reports, often, manifesting as exercise intolerance, a bit non-specific.

Mastitis can be an issue in some of the larger units, commercial units where the colloquial, name of sort of hard bags, these sort of shrunken firm others, develop, which can have quite a significant detrimental impact on productivity, obviously. Diagnosis of CAE hinges a lot around clinical signs and then testing of clinical suspects, with using the blood antibodies serology test. Which is reasonably reasonably reliable.

There isn't a specific treatment and there isn't a commercially available vaccine available in the UK. So control really comes down to being able to identify clinical suspects, tests, and then potentially cull policies, having quite a strict biosecurity and quarantine programme in place where we test incoming animals, and, pasteurisation may help to reduce the level of transmission to young kids. So a combination of these factors, may be helpful.

Cais lymphadenitis, a chronic bacterial disease of sheep and goats. Don't forget that it is zoonotic, and this horrible bacteria tends to attack the superficial lymph nodes and set up and cause green donkey caseous abscesses, which can be really quite smelly and, and stinky. And that pus is incredibly contagious.

So it's very worthwhile isolating any affected cases, whilst either a treatment plan or, or culling is organised. The main thing to be aware of with this disease is that it's often a disease that's introduced into herds. And it's very good practise really to encourage anybody buying or moving animals to go and visit the goat herd of origin first, make sure there's no evidence of, of any other goats within that herd with.

Official lymph nodes and quarantine time after arrival to make sure they're not going to go on and develop abscesses before you release them into your herd. These abscesses, as I said, attack the superficial lymph nodes, which means risk factors are anything which is going to cause these abscesses to rupture and spread this contagious pus around the unit. It might be the feed face, might be some pen architecture, but you know, it's one of those things where the pus once in the environment is very difficult to eliminate and it's going to be contagious and spread around.

Diagnosis is largely on clinical signs, the swollen, infected abscessing lymph nodes. You can take a swab and culture it. And there is a blood sample.

The blood sample, however, is not validated for using goats and has recently come under quite a lot of scrutiny because we're getting or seeing quite a lot of false positive results. The test works quite well for using sheep in It's validated. But in goats, we're getting, cases, positive cases within herds which have never seen CLA lesions.

The animal itself has never had or presented with any kind of CLA lesion, and yet serologically seem to be positive, or at least positive and then test negative and then positive. And so there's some confusion at the moment about the the usefulness of the blood sample within goats. Hopefully there'll be more information on that to come over the coming months.

Treatment may not actually be indicated, given what I've said about it being zoonotic, highly infectious, tends to be poorly responsive to antibiotic treatment. There's a, there's a big, argument here for culling infected individuals and trying to reduce the spread or risk posed by that individual to the rest of your herd. Which brings us on to prevention control, which really is all about biosecurity, doing your damnedest to, to stop it from coming into the herd.

If you get it in the herd, isolate it, call that individual, and, and try and prevent it from getting any further in your herd. I, I put a big question mark over testing currently, particularly if that is going to involve blood sampling, in goats at this point in time. We'll just touch on yoni.

It's, obviously the same bacteria that causes yoni's disease in both cattle and sheep. We know that it's very widespread within the cattle population of increasing prevalence within the sheep population, and to be frank, is, is very widespread within the UK goat, milking population. The disease is obviously, transmission and infectivity is very similar to that of other species picked up as, as neonates with infection.

Transmission, declining as you get older and probably it's quite difficult to pick up the infection once you get beyond 6 months of age. Clinical signs, however, are very different from what you might associate with your disease in cattle. Diarrhoea is really not a common feature at all, apart from very occasionally in the terminal goat patient, where you might see some diarrhoea.

This is much more a disease associated with an insidious, progressive, terminal weight loss and loss of condition. The goat may remain relatively bright for a period of time, until probably recumbency. They might still want to eat, particularly if food is placed inside the mouth, but they just continue to lose the condition, essentially starving to death.

Sometimes you will also get the, sort of plastic sort of bottle jardan, . Swelling, submandibular edoema. There isn't a reliable antemortem test and requires quite careful interpretation.

We do have an invalidated blood test antibody elizer, which can be quite useful when it comes to diagnosis or confirmatory diagnosis of clinical suspects. But we certainly do get a reasonable number of, of false negatives and false positives. So it's used in terms of a, a herd screening test.

It may not be quite there yet. There are quite a few, developments at the moment with other blood tests, which are definitely gonna be worth, keeping an eye and ear open for, including a milk test actually, and hopefully more information will come on that over the following month. There is no treatment available for yoni.

However, there is a vaccine, and that's really quite useful, particularly for the large dairy commercial units. This vaccine doesn't prevent infection, but it will certainly reduce the amount of bacteria which is shed by infected animals. Therefore, helping to reduce the Transmission of this bacterial disease.

And it will also reduce the severity of clinical signs and delay the onset of clinical signs quite markedly. So in the dairy scenario, we'll actually, enable these animals to remain more profitable for longer, more productive for longer, which is obviously a, a bonus. Also, we do have some, progress to, discuss coming forward with vaccine use in some of our larger commercial units.

We're now getting to a point where people have been able to snatch kid, kids out of vaccinated animals, rear them in entirely, Independent isolated units and not vaccinate them and then reintroduce them into the main herd several months after the risk factor for picking up the bacteria has passed. And these goats have, have not, gone on to develop signs of the O's disease, suggesting that the vaccine is, is preventing. Transmission, and enabling us to start to, bring in and introduce yoni's free animals into the herd.

So a bit more progress to be made and with more following of these herds to come. But some some hopeful signs that we might be getting, some way to controlling this disease well in endemically affected herds. As we have an increasing number of goats being kept as pets, it's not uncommon now to be presented with sort of the geriatric goats.

So I thought I'll include a couple of, common diseases and disorders of the geriatric goat, to sort of, come towards the end of our presentation. The first of which is probably dental problems, and, and the first thing to say about the geriatric goat and trying to look In their mouth is that it's quite tricky, particularly when you've got a large lump like this and that top picture, actually getting that mouth open far enough to be able to see what might be the cause of the problem can be quite hard. So a decent small gag, a sort of a stiffened polyurethane pipe, pipe can be quite useful, and a very good head torch, so you can get right in and have a good look at the back is, is really necessary.

Tooth loss and, and resulted overgrowth, probably the top two most common, and then often that will lead on to abscessation, and, and less commonly, neoplasia can, can be found. Treatment's obviously going to be dependent upon what the cause of the dental problem is. And if it's a, a tooth that needs to come out, sometimes that can be quite tricky and they can, can present an anaesthetic, risk, obviously, these geriatric goats.

But depending on what you find, it will determine where you go with, with treatment. But in the forefront of your mind at this stage with these geriatric goats will be their, quality of life and welfare considerations. Neoplasia, this bottom picture is actually a lymphosarcoma affecting the front incisor.

And the, the, the point really I'm trying to make here is that often these neoplasias, particularly or neoplasias, present often as metastatic disease. So you might be presented with a dental problem in a geriatric goat associated with a lump, possible earplasia. But what are we gonna do with it?

And what is the long-term prognosis? Well, oral tumours in particular are often metastatic, disease, and so the long-term prognosis is maybe, not in the best interest to try and, try and treat or remove or do more with it. So having an awareness of what is going on in the whole animal is quite important with these cases.

Mobility problems are certainly one of the most, most common presentations or reasons for presenting older goats to the vet. And osteoarthritis would have to be, high up on that list of differential diagnoses. Reasonably easy, to diagnose, clinical presentation of swollen joints, but not this sort of swollen joint associated with joint, more of a CAE joint actually, when you think about it, this sort of hard, not often hot and bony sort of firm swellings.

X-ray confirmation can be quite useful, useful. And obviously, we're not going to be curing, osteoarthritis, but we might be able to manage it, and that brings me nicely on to chronic pain management. So these cases are going to need and require some kind of long-term analgesia to ensure that they've got a good quality of life for as long as it is possible before the inevitable has to happen.

Now, in the past that would often tend to be long courses of non-steroidals, of which we don't currently have anything licenced for use in goats. We do have obviously non-steroids licence for food-producing animals, however, which has led to the use of things like oral meloxicam, or a series of injections or things like meloxicam, in goats. But long term, these can be quite expensive, and there has been, often a desire to find something a bit cheaper.

Which has led to people using some of the equine products, things like phenolbutasone, which, as I mentioned at the beginning, is probably not, really within keeping, within the principles of the cascade. So what I thought I'd do is share with you something that I use, which is sodium silicate. Trade name is holay.

It is a non-steroidal with an MRL because it's licenced for use in, calves, for analgesia and reduction of pyrexia. And actually this can work really nicely. It's an oral medication given in moist feed or water, or milk if you're dealing with, animals who, who need a bit of nutritional support.

And this is an example of the treatment protocol that I employ. I tend to give her a rest day just to try and be a little bit gut sparing. And I use the calf dose rate as listed on the packet.

And I find that it's actually really quite effective, and you can then, particularly if you're dealing with osteoarthritis, and we know that we're gonna have risk periods within the year, so perhaps more likely to have to treat for longer periods of time or at a higher dose rate over the winter months. You can titrate this dose up and down quite, quite easily. It's incredibly cheap and you're looking at very small volumes to be given daily.

I've had a pygmy goat on it for getting close to 6 years now, and it's getting 0.5 gramme, once a day, for 4 days and then a day off. And so, you know, I tend to dispense it in in sort of 200 grammes, other quarts of 200 grammes at 0.5 gramme a day is gonna go a pretty long way, and, and can be quite a useful drug.

So worth considering. Last couple of diseases, diseases before we wrap it up. A bit of a goat oddity, this one, a cloud burst or pseudo pregnancy, hydrometra, which is essentially an accumulation of abnormal sterile fluid within the non-pregnant uterus.

We don't really understand the exact aetiology, but we certainly seem to see it more often in the older, milking goat animals, particularly those with, with high productivity. And diagnosis can be relatively straightforward by transabdominal ultrasonography. You get quite marked abdominal distention.

You do often see mammary development, and this, sort of speckled, appearance of the ultrasound on the left-hand side there. And then when this, you often get a sort of sudden voiding of fluid, which is quite characteristic of a cloud burst and this liquid coming through. Treatment is relatively straightforward with an injection, intramuscular injection of prostaglandin, may or may not need to be required or repeated 12 days later, depending on whether you still have this fluid accumulation within the uterus or you've not seen the animal avoid that fluid.

But without treating it can, can cause significant production losses, to the commercial, milk sector in particularly. These, these animals not getting back in kid when you expect, and then not being productive as they go forward. And then finally, another sort of goat oddity, these spontaneous milkers can even occur in, in, in goats who've never even encountered a billy, never had a, a kid in their lives.

And all of a sudden, they just seem to produce, an other development and then, and then milk. Quite often we find this in the sort of pet, milking goat breeds. They are from milky breed lines.

Definitely a hereditary trait seems to flow down certain bloodlines. We don't really understand the ey, but it's almost certainly linked to this higher plane of nutrition that these pet or, or show goats are often, often fed. And it's quite, quite telling really that tends to be these show fit goats rather than the production fit goats, which will develop this conundrum.

No real specific treatment. The idea is to try and dry them off really, so not milking them if at all possible. You really want to avoid all forms of other stimulation.

Obviously, when this occurs quite frequently in the summer, that does present or pose quite a mastitis risk, and that's worth bearing in mind. And it's also quite difficult to reduce the concentration or the plane of nutrition during the summer months when goats might be outside browsing and, and getting into all kinds of, of mischief. So it's worth having a think to see what's practical to do, but it might be that we have to accept they're going to milk through the summer months, and you, and you try again at reducing the plane of nutrition, in the back end of the year when it's a little bit easier to control what it is the goats are eating.

So finally, just to summarise what it is we've chatted about this evening, we've talked about the UK goat population, growing annually, but we do likely have an underestimation in the official figures. We discussed ways in which we might want to restrain our goats and how we might handle them. And the fact that our goats are so inquisitive and gregarious, it can actually lead to getting into all kinds of trouble.

So, application of the sort of good interrogation, investigation of the goat environment that you find these goats in is important to working out the risks involved with keeping them. We spent a bit of time talking about the use of medicines in goats and the absence of licenced products of use, and how we're forced them to look at using products of licence on the cascade and where that might put us in terms of milk and meat withhold. We touched a little bit about, that.

Vaccination immunity, and how it's quite complex, but that failure to respond to multiple valent vaccines can lead to us having to increase boosting frequencies and have an understanding that we might need to vaccinate our kids far earlier than we might anticipate, can be useful when developing our herd health plans. We've discussed, anti-lytic resistance. In fact, it's a growing problem and the need for goat-specific doses of wormers.

We've mentioned the, goat-specific licenced wormer at the moment and the risk that may pose to anti-lytic assistance and how we need to be aware of how we use it. We've touched upon disc budding and I've highlighted the previous disc budding webinar that we've done and also the discbudding article, which I'll give you a reference for shortly. And then we've gone on to discuss quite a few common goat diseases and disorders.

I'm fully aware I haven't covered everything. And if you want more detail on anything that I have covered or those that I haven't, please feel free to email me at the address I'll give you shortly. As promised, these are some of the references and useful for reading.

The, book in particular are highlighted about body condition scoring and having good pictures, diagrams, and pictorial guide to certain diseases would be David Harwood and Karen Muller's Goat Medicine and Surgery, . 18 and a really good handy sort of goat formulary if you like, to have in the car if you're out seeing goat cases would be John Matthew's diseases of the goat. It's got some nice treatment options and dose rates within it, as well as a nice easy to read text on various diseases and disorders.

The dis budding, article is there at the top of that list, 2019 in practise. There's also an article on health planning for goats, written by myself and Emily Gascoign, in UK Livestock, magazine, again, the back end of 2019. And finally, just a quick word about the Goat vet Society, for which I'm the honorary secretary.

We are a specialist division of the PVA, and full membership is open to all vet students and vet surgeons and researchers. Associate membership is also open to all goat, farmers and hobbyists and anybody really with an interest in, in keeping goats or, or goats in general. So we are all inclusive.

We try to have a meeting each year. Obviously, it's been a little bit tricky, this year with COVID, but we're hoping to have another face to face meeting next year. And we produce a journal each year which gets sent out, to all, members and then it, appears on our, our website.

I try and send out regular email newsletters as and when things are happening in the go to world. So please consider joining the association, if you want more information or in goats in general. Just 30 pounds a year.

It's a pretty cheap, professional membership to, to hold, and you can join us via the website. The GVS inquiries email is given to you there at the bottom. That's the email.

To use if you want to send any questions you might have, or any diseases you'd like to discuss or or any problems or cases that you'd like some input on. And if I can't help, then I've certainly got my GBS colleague who I can, I can tap into and ask for advice and get back to you with. And just leaves me to say thank you very much for listening and tuning in.

And thank you very much to these people within the GBS. And if you have any questions, please don't hesitate to get in touch. Thank you very much.