Well every day brings new challenges. I noticed my shy little girl Chloe was doing quite a little stamping dance out at the corral, which usually means external parasites.
So right away I went in search of my two black goats Matilda and Lucy, which makes an inspection for lice much easier to view. I sifted through the hair on the back of their neck and found myself some little white nits of nasty.
If you find that your goats have lice and you are closing in on the sunny weather season, often the sun and fresh air work to rid your goats of the lice without any treatment at all.
As we are entering the warm season we could have opted to let the situation rectify itself, but Chloe seemed quite miserable and with the recent loss of one of our little doelings, her mother's stress over the loss and her remaining doeling, little Lucy, being so small, I decided to go ahead and treat the goats for lice. When deciding to treat or not I would normally let the sunshine handle it during the spring and summer because I don't want to over treat anything that could work against me in the future. Using chemicals too frequently causes a build up of resistance to treatment and I don't want to sacrifice that and find myself at a loss when it is truly needed. We surely don't want to have a difficult infestation take hold right now due to the recent stress factors and age vulnerability, so it felt safest to just nip it in the bud, because stress can weaken the goats disposition and allow them to become infested.
There are two types of lice to contend with, sucking lice and biting lice. The sucking lice are more troublesome as they bite the goats and ingest their blood, which can transfer disease to the goats and as well cause anemia. The biting lice eat skin, causing itching and irritation. Excessive itching can cause open sores which could lead to infection, this you want to avoid. Lice tend to begin populating the host in the fall and depending on the winter weather they can take hold in the colder months where goats tend to stay indoors more and with the sun's strength diminished you can find yourself quickly in a situation that gets out of hand.
I like to do things naturally. My typical go to would be neem oil, but with recent stress factors I decided to apply permethrin.
Permethrin is a synthetic version of pyrethrin which is essentially dried chrysanthemum powder. Pyrethrin would again be my choice over the synthetic version as it is environmentally friendly, has low toxicity, but it is unstable and exposure to the sun will lead to ineffectiveness. As we are still in between two seasons I used the synthetic version, which is stable with exposure to the sunlight. If I am treating for lice it would make little sense to apply and not be assured if it will do it's job. also have the option of using ivermectin. I am not a fan.
So I put on my rubber gloves and filled a sock with permethrin powder and proceeded to rub, rub, rub my little darlings coats. Most of the goats where very pleased with this. To them they were receiving a nice scratches. I applied the sock rubbing everywhere bar the face and genital region. The goats essentially lined up saying " Oh nice Mum, your going to scratch our back?". It took me all of 10 minutes to move through the herd, then it came time to do Chloe and little Lucy. First let me say a little goat the size of a chicken is not an easy catch when she clearly sees something wonky
coming at her, yet Chloe certainly put our little Lucy to shame! It took us two hours to delouse my little blue eyed paranoid, flighty, suspicious little luvbug!
Chloe is the one goat in my herd who does not care for love on a good day, let alone a day with a suspicious sock clasped in a rubber gloves. Chloe is always my personal challenge. I spend afternoons bribing her with sunflower seeds, just to get her to come to me. Her mother Flower was much like this when she was younger. There always seems to be one in a bunch who cling to their mother and cast a doubtful eye at the humans.
My husband feels that you must pick them up and they will get over it. Foolish man, you simply can not force a goat to do anything they do not want to do. A goat must think every actions is of their own volition. With Chloe's mom Flower, it took her very first freshening (delivery) to look at me as a good entity, now she follows me around forlorn.
Chloe I have been working on daily with my bribes of sunflower seeds, finally having discovered the one thing she likes enough to be willing to tolerate my advances. So you can see how difficult it would be to delouse her. It is hoof trimming time now as well, so this should prove even more challenging as the only way I was able to delouse Chloe was to put sunflower seeds in a small trough and let all the goats huddle in to eat. When Chloe would immerse herself in the trough I would, as fast as possible, rub the sock across her before she realized it wasn't one of her herd mates rubbing against her in a goat death match for sunflower seeds.
In the end she caught on to what I was doing after I had only gotten a few good swipes over her. I then resorted to having my middle son chase her towards me and I would shake the sock in the air which she would run through covering herself, pretty much a no no if you are within breathing range but at this point I was just willing to poison myself and my little blue eyed brat in an effort to just have the deed done. I can only assume she would be further deloused as the herd snuggled in for the night, so at some point I convinced myself she was done and called it a day.
So essentially 10 minutes to delouse the entire herd and a wee two hours for Chloe.
Now lice have a life cycle so one treatment alone is not going to do the trick. I may need to go back in a second, or third time even if it was winter. Today we may have taken out the adult louse, but there were definitely eggs which will hatch out anywhere between now and 12 days.
All depending on when they were laid. So I will go back in 10 days and retreat the herd and unfortunately Chloe. This way I am getting the unhatched eggs, when they hatch. I will not treat a third time because at that point the sun will be nicely assured and much of their winter coat will be shed letting the sun do it's job.
So when your goats have lice, not to panic, just check the rate of infestation, the time of year and choose your method of advancing and just remember goat lice will not find a home on a human this is assuredly a goat loving lice, it is perfectly normal and part of goat husbandry. Louse On!
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