A few weeks ago we had a scare with one of our new boys…
Chaplan, the happiest little goat on the planet, never stops waggin’ his tail when people are around. A bottle baby (his mommy rejected him), he thinks every human is his mommy and best friend. His eyes light up and he runs over whenever he sees one of us. You can’t help but smile when he does that 🙂
A few weeks after we got him, he started developing a big bump on the side of his jaw.
At first, we thought he’d just been stung by something but we couldn’t find a bite or sting anywhere. We tried sweeping around in his mouth in case a thorn had punctured his cheek or was stuck in his gum. Nothing.
Then we posted his picture on a few goat Facebook groups. And we heard, “that happens to our goats all the time” and “just poke it and drain it” (ewwww) and “it’ll go away.” Not the type to just “poke” stuff, we sent a picture over to our vet to see if he was concerned. He wasn’t and just told us to watch it for a few days.
This happened on a Friday. By Monday it wasn’t getting better so we decided to have the vet out to fix up Happy Chappy.
That’s when it went downhill.
Seriously.
We fired the dude after this.
And threw out his phone number.
The vet, who we’ll call Dr. X, came out while I was on a work call so Leah showed him Chappy. He immediately said, “Looks like CL.”
For those of you who don’t know much about CL – that’s BAD. Really, really bad. Like “cull the goat” bad. Like, “your ground is now tainted” bad. Like, highly contagious bad mofo bad.
But we didn’t know all of that at the time.
Dr. X took Chappy to his truck and stuck in a needle to drain the absess that had formed in Chappy’s cheek. He took one look at the pus, sniffed it, and said, “Yup, seems like CL.” Then he injected formaline into Chappy’s face.
He told us to keep Chappy seperate from the rest of the goats for the next couple of weeks until his face healed up. Once he’s healed, he can go back in with everyone else.
IMPORTANT: This is not true. CL (Caseous Lymphadenitis) is a serious infection. A “will f#@k up your land and your herd” kind of infection. It will literally taint your land – for who knows how long.
And you can’t diagnose CL by look or smell – ’cause science.
But we’ll get to that in a minute.
Leah texted me while I was on my call and told me what the vet said. I knew something had to be up because I could see her moving the other goats away from Chappy.
I tried to stay professional on my call while freaking out looking at google images of how bad CL can be. Poor Chappy 🙁
When I got off the phone Leah and I huddled up to talk about it. By this point she had put out an SOS on multiple goat Facebook groups and contacted Chappy’s breeder. She asked an important question, “Did Dr. X test the pus or the blood?”
ARGH!
No, he didn’t. He threw it all away.
%#@%$$#@^
Yeah, apparently you TEST the pus. Or rather you culture it to see what grows so you know for sure.
So the next day we called up another town vet and asked if they see goats. They could see us that afternoon. We packed Chappy into the CRV and took him for a ride.
Let me rewind for a minute, so you can get a picture of how disruptive this entire situation was for us. We have 10 goats. We milk two of them and use their raw milk in our household. We try to be as organic as possible with our practices and what we feed them. And most important of all, we love ’em.
It was 100% top priority that if Chappy actually had CL, we did not want it to spread to any of the other goats.
We quarantined Chappy in a kennel far away from everyone else during the day and then put him in a dog crate in the garage at night.
We also:
- Disinfected our shoes everytime we exited his kennel
- Gave him a dedicated water bucket and food bin
- Scrubbed our hands
- Changed our clothes
- Showered after carrying him
- Dumped his water at the edge of the property
It was really intense.
When we took him to the other vet they were shocked by how Dr. X treated Chappy. Well, not too shocked. They knew the guy. When we said his name there were eye rolls all around.
This vet wasn’t sure it was CL. It could just be an absess from who-knows-what. But she was cautious and we were too. She wanted to do a culture from the pus. Unfortunately because Dr. X had shot formuline directly into the absess the bacteria in the pus was probably dead.
@#$^%#@
We asked if he could get a blood test for CL and she told us that unless he’s built up enough antibodies, we may get a false negative.
@$#@^@$
The new vet also pointed out to us – if Chappy had CL, we should cull him.
No, not Happy Chappy!
So we had really only two options – cull him now or keep doing the extreme quaratining until we could get a good culture from him.
We didn’t want to cull him if there was a good chance he didn’t have CL. I know some people, including his breeder, would have culled him at this point because he was costing too much money and it wasn’t worth the risk.
The money wasn’t an issue. We’re talking a couple of hundred bucks overall. I didn’t love spending it but it was worth it to me to try and figure out what was wrong with our little buddy. Plus, if we didn’t get a good culture, we wouldn’t know for sure either way and we’d always worry that we had CL on the property.
I wanted to know for sure before we did anything.
Since he didn’t have a fever and wasn’t in too much pain, the vet suggested we wait a few days for the absess to re-form. This was pretty likely since Dr. X (seriously, did this guy do anything right?) had only poked a hole in the absess with a needle to get the pus out. Normally you’d cut it open so that it keeps actively draining. Not Dr. X.
And because Dr. X had only poked a hole and then injected the formuline, Chappy’s face had swollen up even more.
The poor little guy looked terrible. But his tail still wagged when we came over to visit him! He was flirting it up with everyone at the vet clinic. They don’t get to see Nigerian Dwarfs very often so they all came over to say “Hi” to him.
We took Chappy back home and we waited…
For three more days…
And finally we got his absess lanced open and a sample sent off for a culture.
Great, right?
How long could this take?
Apparently up to FOUR WEEKS or MORE!
@#$#@%!@%
*deep breaths*
Okay, we can do this. We already had a plan in place. We knew what we were doing and we just had to keep it up.
I won’t lie to you. It was hard.
All the washing, changing clothes, disinfecting everything, and walking past Chaplan without giving him scratches because seriously, I can’t shower a fourth time today – it was really hard to keep it all up.
But we did.
And luckily it only took about 9 days for us to get the results back. It wasn’t CL.
Phew
So here’s what we learned in all of this:
- Have a plan for quarantining and other medical emergencies
- Trust your gut not an “authority”
- Stay calm and positive – until you know, you don’t know
- Teamwork makes the dreamwork
Chaplan is back with his bros again and his face is all healed up.
And his tail is probably wagging right now 😉