Mystery Mortality (Milk Glut)

In the last two weeks we've gone from four baby goats to only two baby goats. One of them was served at our big party, so that was an expected death (and very delicious he was, too; I'm thinking in the future we may choose to butcher at 4 months instead of seven). However the second death, that of Flopsy's buckling Comet, was a complete mystery.

Comet was one of Flopsy's twins, born in March. The other buckling was sold intact for a very decent price and presumably is doing just fine. Comet was wethered and was marked as a meat animal, but that didn't stop him from being a favorite because he was so cute. Usually we don't name animals we plan on eating, but this little guy's white spots on a black background gave him the name Comet.

Comet was perfectly healthy and never ailed a day in his rather short life, until the last day. In the morning we heard him screaming and walked out to look for him in the tall grass. He was standing alone, sides heaving, with green frothy vomit all over his head and neck. Goats do not vomit. They just don't. In all my time raising goats, I have only ever seen them vomit from severe carbohydrate overload, and that obviously hadn't happened here because the barn where we keep the grain was closed and locked. 

As the day progressed, Comet kept screaming, almost continuously, and wouldn't eat, drink, or nurse. There was no more vomit, but he frothed at the mouth and dripped saliva. He was not pooping, though he would strain and heave. His symptoms seemed to be almost exclusively GI related - no neurological symptoms, no staggering or looking up at the sky like goats do when brain damaged. He got progressively dehydrated.

We spoke to the vet, of course. I thought of plant poisoning - we do have several poisonous plants on the property, but the goats generally leave them alone. I mentioned tansy, rhododendron, and hemlock, but the vet said none of those would cause vomiting, and would produce neurological signs. He suggested that a blockage was much more likely and said we should bring him in for exploratory surgery. He also said that vomiting was quite likely to cause inhalation pneumonia and that he would need antibiotic treatment quickly to avoid death from that cause. 

Well, that wasn't going to happen. Here I had an animal with a cash value of approximately $75 to $100, and treatment options began at several hundred dollars, with, of course, no guarantee of a good outcome. We decided to give Comet the day to start showing signs of recovery and to put him out of his misery if he continued the same or worse. Since he wouldn't drink, he was getting very dehydrated. He began to pant heavily and collapsed.

In the belief that a blockage was the most likely explanation, I decided to try and drench him with some neutral oil. I was terrified that I was going to pour a pint of oil into his lungs and kill him, but he was pretty close to dying already and I figured I couldn't very well make things worse. With Homero's help, we slid a tube down his throat and poured in some oil, and Comet thrashed weakly and fought us off the best he could. 

I don't know if his efforts exhausted his last reserves or if we did, in fact, kill him by our "treatment" but within a half hour he was obviously close to death, still crying weakly, so we went ahead and euthanized him with a .22. Poor little guy. 

We thought about having the vet do a post mortem, but Homero said he could do it himself, at least look for anything obvious. We skinned and prepared him for butchering as usual, but instead of throwing out the GI tract intact, Homero dissected it. I was expecting to find a fat, red gut, evidence of a torsion or a severe blockage, but everything looked completely normal. His intestines were slim, pearly grey, and just about empty. The liver and gallbladder were normal as well. Homero even opened up the rumen and checked carefully for any foreign objects, but there was just nothing to be found. 

The only odd thing we did find is that one of his lungs was swollen and covered in petechiae (small blood spots, showing that there had been a hemorrhage). The lung was abnormal enough that it might have explained his death, but of course I suspected I might have caused that myself by pouring a bunch of oil into it. It is also possible that he inhaled something and then damaged himself trying to cough it out. Severe coughing can cause vomiting in people, I don't know about goats. I thought eight hours would be too soon to show evidence of inhalation pneumonia, but maybe not. My farrier told me they once had a horse die in less than a day from that cause. 

I haven't the slightest idea what killed Comet. Well, I know what killed him - a bullet to the back of the head. But I have no idea what made him so sick. It could have been anything, from plant poisoning (a friend sent me a page from an old goat medicine book that detailed symptoms of rhododendron poisoning, and it was oddly accurate. It mentioned the screaming, the vomiting, and the labored breathing. I don't know why the vet said rhododendrons don't cause vomiting) to some kind of allergic reaction to a bite or sting. I am, however, pretty sure it wasn't a contagious illness because every other goat on the place is healthy as pie. 

It's been three days now, and no other goat has shown the slightest sign of any illness. On the contrary, they all are sleek and plump, and giving large quantities of milk. Now I have two in-milk does who have no kids on them, and so I am milking two goats twice a day. Once, long ago, I sold off all my kids young and then spent the next four months chained to the milking stand, and I swore I would never do that again. Goats must be milked every twelve hours, rain or shine, unless they have kids to nurse. I am bringing about two gallons of milk a day into the house, and it is a constant challenge to figure out what to do with it. 

A couple of days ago, we made cajeta (sweet delicious goat's milk caramel sauce - for a recipe visit  http://www.everything-goat-milk.com/cajeta.html), which used up a few gallons. I have several pounds of cheese in the fridge, and right now there is a whole pillowcase full of chèvre hung up to drain outside. It's a damn shame I can't sell any of this cheese. Good friends and neighbors are encouraged to drop by with containers. Feel free to bring any surplus garden vegetables you have. I'm particularly fond of snap peas. 

It's tough to lose an animal without knowing why. I'm sorry Comet suffered so much. I wish I knew what happened so I could try to prevent it from ever happening again. But at least I can be reasonably sure it wasn't due to any gross farming error on my part. The other healthy goats attest to that. 

Tree Trouble (What the Hell is Wrong With These Plums?)

Sometimes I despair of the orchard. I really do. There are so many factors conspiring against trees here; some of them natural, others decidedly of my own making. We didn't site the orchard very well, to begin with. It's right up on the highest part of the property, where the prevailing winds hit the trees full on. The trees in the southernmost row are all hunched over, curled around their own trunks, almost in the fetal position.

The soil up there is poor and rocky; further down, it gets spongy and has poorish drainage. The highest trees struggle in the compact gravel while the lower ones have wet feet most of the year. Of the five trees we planted the first year, only one remains, the italian plum. The rest succumbed to a variety of maladies, known and unknown.

The orchard has been repeatedly attacked by goats. A herd of six or seven goats can really blow through a young orchard if you give them fifteen minutes unmolested. Then there are the times - yes, more than one - that I rode right over a first-year tree on the riding lawnmower. Sometimes I used to have a few beers before I decided the grass was getting a little long.

It's amazing, the sheer variety of of pests that have plagued my orchard. I didn't know there even WERE so many fruit tree pests. There are the ones that look like tiny little slugs sticking all over the cherry tree leaves, and that, as far as I can tell by googling, are called "bird-poop worms." There's fire blight on the pears. Caterpillars chew on the leaves and voles gnaw on the roots. Something makes certain leaves turn white; something else makes other leaves curl up. Yet something else shreds them like a hail of tiny meteors. There's white fly and mildew and scab, oh my.

It's really too bad, because I believe that the orchard is rightly the cornerstone of a successful homestead. Nothing gives such return on investment as does an apple tree. Twelve or fifteen healthy, highly productive fruit trees would supply a family with much of their family's needs - for fresh fruit, certainly, but also for winter preserves, for animal forage, for shade and beauty, even, perhaps, for some extra cash from a farm stand. A good milk goat is a valuable creature, but she doesn't begin to touch the worth of a good tree.

Much of my orchard's problems are due to simple neglect. I have taught myself a little about pruning, but I'm timid and afraid of doing damage. I hate to use sprays, and I haven't even used fertilizer. The orchard is far from the hose, and to water it in the long dry stretches of August, I have to carry a whole lot of five gallon buckets around, and I haven't done that as consistently as I should. Considering the potential worth of these trees, and the money already invested, it's probably worth it to get a real tree person out here to prune and give me suggestions. Certainly, the current state of affairs is intolerable.

Today I went out to check out the plums on the plum tree. I had been delighted to see that we actually had a decent number of plums this year, but then I began to get annoyed by the plums' mystifying refusal to ripen. Here it is, practically mid August, and the plums are still green as grass and hard as rocks. Hunting diligently through the ratty, tattered foliage, I managed to find two plums that were respectably purple, and even sort of soft. So I bit into one.

I haven't got the foggiest clue what is wrong with those plums, but they taste like satan's compost pile. They are filled with a brown, mushy gunk that seems to be fermented and rotten. Checking carefully all over the skins, I didn't see any holes, nor did I find any insects in the stinking brown mush. Maybe it's a fungus of some sort. Maybe it's a virus. Maybe it's monkeys, I don't know! But it makes me VERY UNHAPPY.

Chicken Follow-up

I got a call from the dept. of Ag's veterinarian who did the necropsy on my chicken yesterday. He just left a message, which made me feel awful. He said that this poor chicken had numerous serious injuries, dating back at least six months! It had a broken keel bone, was extremely emaciated and dehydrated, and it's intestines were basically destroyed by diarrhea! There's almost nothing more that could be wrong with this chicken! 

The only thing that mitigates my guilt is that this chicken was given to me less than six months ago, so it didn't suffer it's broken bones at my house. 

He didn't tell me what organism caused the diarrhea, but I'm treating them all with sulfa in their water. The most likely organisms are salmonella and coccidia. The eggs are all fine, as long as we cook them well. No other birds appear ill, so I'm kind of at a loss.

Poultry Plague

Over the last three weeks, two chicken s have died, and now a third is very ill. The first one was one that my sister gave me, and it was a pretty sickly chicken when I got it. Those chickens never blended well with the rest of the flock, and slept outside in the pig pen, so I wasn't surprised when it died. I assumed it died of exposure.

The second chicken died about a week later. It was that weird old red hen that never was quite right; she was always off by herself and appeared to be blind in one eye. I had no idea how old she was, so when she died, I chalked it up to old age. 

But this morning, a previously healthy young chicken was sick. Same as the red hen, she just couldn't get up, but she did eat when I put food right in front of her. Now I was getting worried, because there has been a big thing in the news this week that they found avian influenza on a turkey farm just over the border in B.C. The department of Agriculture is setting up a "command post" here in Whatcom County for farmers to bring eggs to be tested.

Considering the fact that I am a nurse, and wanted to be a public health nurse at that, I decided I couldn't ignore this situation. I called my regular vet, and they gave me other numbers to call, even as far as the state capitol in Olympia. The upshot, after speaking to at least four different agencies and entities, is that the local chapter of the state department of agriculture is sending a vet out to my farm to collect the eggs and the chicken, who will hopefully be dead by then. He's on his way, and I'm probably going to be late to pick up my daughter from school.

The eggs can be tested for AI, and the chicken will be subjected to a necropsy. The chances that this is bird flu are miniscule. It's much more likely to be salmonella or coccidia (both bacterial diseases that can be treated easily). Even if it were to be bird flu, it would not likely be a dangerous type. They've already typed the Canadian strain and it's not transmissible to humans.

But all my chickens would have to be killed.