It’s been a hard few days here. The kind of hard that makes me wonder why on earth I’m doing this.
We’ve had some kind of fast moving pneumonia—or something—sweep through the goat herd. Saturday morning the girls went out to do chores and found Aurora dead in the goat stall, and Pippi and Carina down and extremely ill. We brought those two into the kitchen—not an easy job—but they died an hour or so later. The symptoms at the time seemed consistant with poisoning: they all were foaming and slobbering; they were very cold; and they all died quickly and around the same time (Pippi and Carina died within seconds of each other). ED and I freaked out, deciding that it was the clover hay we’ve been feeding them; the girls ran out and removed all the hay from the feeder, and noticed that Guinevere and Jessamine were feeling poorly, so they brought them in. This time, watching the progression of the illness, we could see that it was a respiratory thing. Both goats appreciated the warmth of the woodstove, and moved in behind it. We went to bed Saturday evening feeling somewhat confidant that both does were going to be okay; it was a very long, noisy, sleepless night, and by 5 o’clock Sunday morning it was obvious that Guinevere was not okay, and Jessamine was very sick, too.
At 8 ‘clock I wasmaking frantic phone calls and panicky internet research, and decided that we were dealing with pneumonia, although the heavy slobbering and the speed of the disease didn’t seem to match.
I gave Guinevere and Jess each a shot of penicillin, but it was too little too late for Guinevere, and she died soon after.
ED and I went out and gave the rest of the goats a dose of penicillin—1 cc per hundred pounds IM; I talked to a vet later that afternoon and he recommended 10 cc’s per hundred pounds, subcutaneously. So ED and I did that during evening chores.
Jessamine spent the night behind the cookstove, and this morning was alert and very, very weak. She went to the front door, obviously wanting out, so I let her out and followed her around the yard in my bathrobe. She headed for the barn—-I dressed first—-and she checked in with the remaining herd. She’s now comfortable in the hay room, eating the (presumably innocent) hay. The other goats are all doing fine.
Over the past couple of years we pared our herd down to eight very nice does. We had two or three goats from each of our three foundation does’ lines, each of which had its own strengths and weaknesses. Now we’re down to four does, and only one descendent each from Desi and Katie. Tallulah is the third, and Jessamine is her daughter, so we have two from that line.
This has been particularly hard on ED, as Aurora and Pippi both belonged to her. Pippi was the orphan that ED bottle raised.
I’m exhausted and full of regret and self recrimination. This morning I’m on my way to the Ag center to drop off Guinevere’s body for necropsy, and to buy more penicillin.
