Running a Fecal Test on my Sick Goat!

So last week we tried something we've never done before by transferring rumen from one goat to another and this week we're going to check up on our baby goat and see how she's doing and kind of give you an update of what's been going on over the last week. All right so there she is she's back she's doing all right so last week I told you how she was super skinny and I wasn't seeing any signs of barber pole worm which you can check their FAMACHA scores and she didn't have any scours or anything like that and some of my viewers commented very wisely that she could still have worms like stomach worms and things don't show up on that anemia test on their eyes. So I did run a fecal sample and she was loaded with worms so I super appreciate you guys for commenting and reminding me of things that I know but just forget about in the moment. So I gave her a fecal exam I ran that I have been giving her an herbal wormer we use land of javala herbal wormer and some apple cider vinegar and garlic oil multiple times a day. It's been just about a week since we checked on her and so I'm going to run her fecals again today and see if we're seeing some improvement. She seems a little perkier and livelier obviously she can't gain weight instantly but we're just going to kind of bring you along I'm going to give her some more of the wormer today and then we'll show you a little bit of how we run a fecal test. It's actually pretty easy to do at home and pretty fascinating maybe a little gross but pretty cool and so I'll show you that process and hopefully she will be doing a lot better today. She's gonna run away from me that little girl well she's definitely feeling better because she wasn't she was not that spunky at all so good girl oh I'm glad she's doing better she feels better I mean obviously she hasn't can't put on that much weight that quickly but she feels much much better all right let me give her this dose here I know you guys are so nosy just let go of her she's fine I need to actually collect a fecal sample from her so maybe farm life if the goat runs away from you it's definitely good luck to catch it coming out so I just have my hand in a ziploc baggie and then you catch it and you turn the ziploc baggie inside all righty so I have my sample I'm gonna head in the house and do a fecal test using a migmaster slide to see how her parasite load is doing and we'll kind of show you the results hopefully she is doing better I know the herbal warmers work a little slower than the other ones but I'm not really interested in chemical warmers in my dairy goats and so we are trying to somewhat as we can breed for parasite resistance and if they're going to be super susceptible to worms and they're not going to be hardy enough to manage the worm load when they have it then I'm not super interested in having them so we do our best but I do draw the line at chemical warmers for the for my ladies and that's just kind of how it is each farmer has to make the choices that they make because we have to deal with the financial repercussions of our decisions and the health choices that we're making so hopefully she is doing well she is acting much perkier and much more with it and I am so excited about that she is a super sweet goat she's super cute so let's go in and I'll show you what I can I think I have a way to show you what's in my microscope but I'm not sure but there are some cool google images and I'll try to find some stuff and show you what the worms look like and we'll see how she's doing all right so to do a fecal test at home all you need is a microscope this is just a cheap kids one my first lab it works great I don't remember how much it was on Amazon but it was not a ton and then this is a McMaster slide and a little vial here that we need it says it's from Vetslides.com and so this is all you need to run your test so you put some fecal feca med flotation solution in here and they have a line for sheep and goats they even have one for horses as well I don't I ran out of my little jar I normally just keep a jar with some in it so I don't have to get into this big bottle all the time so we just fill this it's 28 milliliters to the sheep and goat line and then you carefully strategically take some of your pellets and put them in and what we're doing is trying to get that float line to come up to the 30 mil line super simple it's normally four or five pellets there we go so that's all I need okay so then I use this popsicle stick to smash it all up mix it up it breaks up pretty easily I know this is probably the grossest part but honestly it's just hay grass it's really not that bad yeah I'm trying to get this all broken now take this and my goat only strainer I don't even though it gets washed I don't use it for anything else I'm gonna filter out the solids that's all we need that for make sure that the strain's down in my little cup I wipe the whole thing down when we're done here I have to wash my hands anyway it's not that big of a deal okay so then we take a one mil syringe we get some of our glue in put it in our slide there we go okay all right so I'm done with it so here are the slides and so there's these green grids so what you do is you use the microscope to focus on the green grids you first start with the the smallest one is that five yeah you use the smallest one first you focus on the green line then you go to the 10x and you get that green line focused in and then the parasite eggs will be level and in focus when that green line is in focus and you just go up and down each green section and count the eggs that you see I'll show a little chart of what most of the common parasites look like and then you just count them and so Ellie is going to help me count I normally just kind of count them out loud and she puts tally marks in a book and we'll go from there okay so I have to find the first one yes I know getting direction right okay so I found the bottom corner I make sure it's nice and focused and I see my first egg all right so then I'm just gonna move all right one two all right 31 so how many total is that Ellie? 62 62 okay so a few days ago when we did it she had 87 and I know that there's like some math formula to figure out how many eggs that really is but honestly it doesn't it doesn't matter and those numbers um the numbers kind of don't mean anything because what one goat can handle is totally different than what another goat can handle um so the only thing that is really useful as a farmer is a comparison from one day to the next so I do know that 87 is pretty high um we've had one other goat that was super sick he had like 99 or something when I counted the two slides um but all that matters is that it is going down and changing so 87 to 62 in it's less than seven days because I did not run the fecal on that first day right Saturday I think I ran the fecal on Saturday and today is Thursday so anyway uh that's pretty good improvement obviously she's still got a long way to go and so I will keep dosing her with that herbal warmer and with the garlic pop garlic oil but that is really encouraging that matches up with what she's doing I'm excited that she is doing so well even with still a high load so she's not out of the woods but um she's going down so I'm not concerned about it um if the worst were to happen and she were to pass away that would be devastating but at the same time I don't have any reason to think that that's going to happen based on our numbers so again um there's all sorts of numbers out on the internet I know when I started doing fecal tests um it was like oh okay well what do I do with that number how scary is that number and sometimes um they'll scare you online if the numbers are even in the 20s and so I think experience on your own farm and your own animals and then your own threshold for what you're willing to accept so again we don't want to use a chemical warmer on our farm and so this is what I have to be okay with and then I just have to keep on top of it I have to give that herbal warmer more often um I think I gave it three times on Saturday after I ran the fecal actually no probably only twice and then maybe twice Sunday and really it's probably only been once a day since then um since she still has such a high load I'll probably try to make sure I get two in her today and for the next couple days and I'll come back and I'll run this fecal again but I mean this is all there is to it I don't have to stress or freak out about it these numbers just are what they are she was clearly sick when I started and um she is headed in the right direction um so yeah we'll make sure the other goats get some warmer too but they're all doing well and this is just kind of what that parasite management looks like there isn't really any way to get it down super low and it kind of doesn't matter as long as the goats are hardy enough to uh resilient is the word so they're not resistant she has worms but she is resilient she is doing okay even with that load and that's kind of what we're looking for so thanks for watching we hope that this was helpful and we will see you next week