Independence Homestead

In Part 1 I detailed the situation and symptoms we found in Storm…

He had a low temperature and weakness in his rear end. The symptoms seemed unrelated in that I couldn’t find one illness that listed both problems as symptoms.

I decided the first priority would be to address his low temperature, which indicated an issue with the digestive system. Goats create their heat by ruminating. Apparently, Storm was having some kind of stomach issue. Like with any sick animal on the homestead, treatment started by moving Storm  to a solitary pen. We always have a chainlink dog kennel set up in case we need a pen in a pinch, so Storm moved in there. I mixed some probiotic powder with milk, and he drank it down. Then I filled the kennel’s hay rack with hay, and refreshed the water bucket. Storm ate a good amount of the hay that day, and the following day his temperature was back up to normal! We had addressed his low temperature caused by a digestive issue. I continued to give him probiotic powder and hay for several days, and monitored his temperature to ensure it didn’t fall again.

Storm still had significant weakness in his back legs. He could get up and walk, but he’d struggle. He would fall down easily as well. In all my research, the only thing that made sense was a meningeal worm infection. It’s a leading cause of hind leg weakness in goats, and it’s most prevalent in the fall when leaves have fallen. Tennessee Meat Goats has a great article about this parasite.

I’d always dismissed the meningeal worm as unlikely to be an issue at our homestead because we don’t have especially high rainfall and our land doesn’t hold water. We’re on a hill, not in a wetland! Still, we get plenty of slugs around whenever it is wet, and slugs are the intermediate host for the meningeal worm. We also have a lot of whitetail deer around, and they spread the parasite. Plus we have a ton of deciduous trees, so there’s a lot of leaf litter on the ground in the fall. It’s completely reasonable to imagine Storm was grazing on fallen leaves and inadvertently ate a slug.

A challenge with the meningeal worm is that you cannot test for it with a fecal test. Lab testing of it requires cerebrospinal fluid, which is pretty hardcore. The resources said the best thing to do if you think your goat has this parasite is start treatment.

Read Part 3 to learn about our treatment protocol and the results.