Hi, yesterday I woke up to a sick angora 2 day old goat that I took after birth due to the mother's teats being too large and fear that the baby would not be able to nurse. I do this routinely when I see there may be a problem involved with the nursing or mothering. The baby was fine,nursing ,got mother's colostrum. I fed here at 1230 am and at 6:00 she had her head hung forward, refused to nurse and could hardly stand. Her stomach area felt heavy and sloshed. I drenched her with 2 oz.warm pedialyte with 2 oz. peptobismol with one open capsule of ampicillin in it. I also gave her a 5 cc subcutaneous injection of D5LR and 1/2 cc of Pen.B 48.Her body temperature decreased and I placed her between heating pads on low setting and propped her head up on rolled towels.By 10:30 AM she was dead.I had her in the house since she was born so I know she was not injured.What did I do wrong or could have done. I could never get her temp up. I also gave her a warm enema and she had good formed stool.Could this be a clostridium infection, floppy kid? One thing I did not do was give a injection of penicillin when she was born. Could giving her C&D and spectram after her colostrum have helped. Any suggestions for further prevention? Thanks, Terry

-- Terry Lipe (elipe@fidnet.com), April 04, 2002

Answers

One of our doelings had a bout of what I think was entertoxemia the other day. My Mom and sis, with her kids were out and the kids loved watching the babies at the lambar, not watching closely because of all the help :) with chores I know they were getting more milk than they should. She had a bloated, but not hard, sort of spongy tummy and was pityfully crying, not the screaming and kicking that you normally see. I gave her a whopping shot of CD antitoxin and baking soda, some banamine for the pain and to calm her gut and she was fine in the morning, so much so that I didn't continue with anything else. Giving the vaccinations to the kids at birth isn't going to do anything, you would have to use the antitoxin. Even with vaccinating the dams before kidding, the kids can get enterotoxemia from to much milk. How much milk did she take at the previous feeding? Enteroxemia C&D and their are many others, are always in the system, and just like cocci, we don't really know what makes them start to multiply so quickly, but when they do it kills very quickly also. We start cocci prevention at 3 weeks. I do use spectram if we have any kind of diarrhea (even if I think it is just from too much milk) between cocci preventions every 21 days. Honestly Spectram is for Ecoli and you can smell it a mile away! I could see no reason for penicillin on an infant. We do use Tylan 50 for congested lungs or rattles from inhalation of amniotic fluid. I don't use pepto on infants because it tars the poop and you can't tell if you are dealing with blood in the stool even under the microscope or pepto. saanendoah.com has a good entero article, and I just posted one here (I think) from Nubian Talk. Bernice will know where other articles are for you to read. I was just typing as I was thinking, so everything isn't really in order :) Now you know how weird my brain thinks :) Vicki and sorry about the kid!

-- Vicki McGaugh TX (Nubians) (vickilonesomedoe@hotmail.com), April 04, 2002.