Chicken Scraps Blog

First, I'll give Ritz's history as far as I understand it.  Ritz is a purebred LaMancha buck from registered parents.  His owner was a lady who lived about half an hour away from us, and died a few months ago from cancer.  Her husband didn't have time for the goats, and just wanted them to have good homes, so through a mutual friend, Ritz came to me, along with a LaMancha/ Nubian doe, Violet.  He was registered, but his papers were lost at some point a few years ago, and his owners didn't trouble to get duplicates.  (I am currently working on obtaining a duplicate certificate, but that hasn't happened yet.)      Apparently, his owner didn't understand that goats needed to be wormed on a regular basis, and so when the two arrived, they were in bad shape, especially Ritz.  He was quite underweight, even though he was regularly fed, his coat was coarse and curling, and I don't know how much longer he would have lasted without worming.  Ever since I got him

I love my dairy goats.  My herd is quite small, but learning to manage them so that they stay healthy has been difficult.  To begin with, I didn't know anyone who owned dairy goats, and the only information I'd ever read about management of them didn't say a word about de-worming.  So I lost most of my first herd, due to lack of knowledge.      That was several years ago.  I bought Mabel in June, 2011.  That first year was still a struggle to keep her healthy, because I didn't want to feed the commercially mixed grain, or the chemical de-wormer, and wasn't yet serious enough about feeding proper minerals.  She was constantly getting wormy, which made her coat coarse, and she lost weight.  Finally though, I tried the Hoegger herbal wormer , and it worked!  From then on, whenever a goat looks a bit wormy, I give her a treatment of this wormer, and that takes care of the problem.  There is no milk/ meat withdrawal time, and it is safe to use, even in