Cheryl K. Smith - Raising Goats For Dummies

When you’re checking out your property, yard, garage, or barn in preparation for your goats, reconsider items that you have stored or are in use there with an eye to goat safety. If you’re going to drink your goats’ milk or eat them, you are also at risk of ingesting any poison that your goats get into. Remove any items that might put a goat at risk, especially

Lead paint: Goats love to chew and will invariably chew on walls, especially if you don’t want them to. Lead paint is common in old barns and other structures. To be safe, assume that the paint on old walls and doors is lead-based, and don’t use those areas for goats. Bare, untreated wood is actually best.

Railroad ties: If you are putting up a new structure and have access to free railroad ties, don’t use them. They contain creosote, which is poisonous to goats.

Plastic: Keep all plastic, particularly plastic bags and plastic twine, out of reach of goats. Goats that swallow plastic can suffer from a blocked rumen and lose weight or die. (See “Hardware disease” in Chapter 11.) Swallowing plastic also causes symptoms such as loss of appetite, decreased milk production, and bloating. Be careful to properly dispose of plastic from mineral blocks or other types of feed.

Solvents and other chemicals: Make sure that you have removed any old kerosene, solvents, or other chemicals that people often keep in garages or barns. These hazards can sicken or kill goats. Even those stored on high shelves within a goat area aren’t safe.

Pressed wood/fiberboard: This is another material that some goats will chew on, if given the chance. They’ll eat holes in a building made of this material.

Store all feed away from your goats in an area they can’t access. If they inadvertently get to grain, they will eat until it’s gone — and then you will have very sick or dead goats. It happened to me once, and I didn’t know which goats had overeaten (except the LaMancha instigator) and so I had to treat many goats. The feeling of panic is terrible, and so is the guilt when a goat dies because of your mistake. See Chapter 11to find out about enterotoxemia (overeating disease).

A tethered goat is like a piece of cheese in a mousetrap. The goat is bait for coyotes, cougars, dogs, or any predator that lives in the area. When you tether your goats, you put them at risk. Because goats are browsers, they won’t stand still while on a rope. They move constantly, which means that they may circle around a tree or get hung up in a branch. If they are left on a hot day, they may get dehydrated because they are unable to get to water after wrapping themselves around an object. Goats may hang or choke themselves with a chain or rope. The snap holding them may come off or break and release them into a high traffic or otherwise dangerous area.

My neighbor had a goat that he tethered in the orchard to eat down the grass. One day he had a feeling that something was wrong and came down the hill to find the goat hung from a tree branch. I don’t know how he managed to do that (but then, he was a goat), but fortunately the neighbor got there before the goat had choked to death.

Don’t tether your goats. Instead, build them a proper fence, or if you need to move them around, use cattle panel sections or electric wire to create a barrier that you can move from place to place during the day. And supervise them or get them a guardian for protection.

The best way to ensure that your goats are safe, especially if you don’t have a guardian animal, is to make sure that they are secured in a building with no open windows from dusk until dawn. Unless you have a very heavy door, make sure the door closes and latches to prevent animals from getting in and goats from getting out.

Find out about the common predators in your area when deciding how to keep your goats safe. Don’t think that because you are raising goats in the city that you don’t have to worry about predators. While some of the animals that we traditionally think of as predators are rarely found in the city, dogs are rampant and birds abound. Kids are particularly at risk, because they are small and lack life experience.

Here are some of the more common goat predators. If you have a goat attack, you can determine which of these predators is responsible by examining the scat (manure) left behind and by the focus of the attack.

Dogs are the worst predators of goats, attacking and killing more often than any wild animal and doing it for fun rather than because they’re hungry. Dogs go after goats individually or in packs, with pack attacks being the worst for obvious reasons.

Dogs dig under fences to get to goats or other small livestock. You can identify a dog attack because dogs usually go for a goat’s hind legs and rear end. They can kill or cause injuries severe enough to create major physical problems for a goat. Goats that are attacked by dogs often have to be euthanized or die later from the trauma of being terrorized and seeing their herd mates killed.

Eastern coyotes hunt individually, looking for weak members of a herd; western coyotes hunt in packs. You can tell the difference between a coyote attack and a dog attack because dogs chase and try to get as many goats as they can, while coyotes, which are looking for food, will go for the throat and then try to get at a goat’s internal organs. They may even try to carry the animal away for safe eating.

If you hear coyotes howling in your area, your goats are at risk if they don’t have additional protection such as a guardian animal or high tensile electric fencing. Neither of these is failproof, though; I have heard of packs of coyotes luring a dog away while other cohorts go after the goats.

Cougars hunt individually. They leave tooth punctures and claw marks on the upper torso when they attack a goat. They also have been known to drag their prey a distance away, bury it, and come back later to eat. A good livestock guardian dog will normally deter a cougar, unless it is very hungry. Nevertheless, I know of a rancher whose three Great Pyrenees guardian dogs were killed by a cougar one by one over several nights.

If you live in an area with cougars, get more than one livestock guardian dog to protect your goats.

Ravens and black vultures attack goats from time to time — generally when they are down from sickness or trying to have their kids outside. Ravens peck an animal’s head and gouge out its eyes. Ravens attack in groups, which causes a problem for does trying to protect more than one kid.

The USDA recommends hanging an effigy (fake vulture carcass) to deter vultures. Owls, eagles, and large hawks also may bother small kids, especially if they get separated from their mothers and cry. You can prevent losses to all types of birds by making sure your goats have safe, indoor kidding pens.

Wolves, bears, foxes, wild pigs, and even feral cats will go after goats if their regular food supply is disrupted. You only have to read the newspaper to realize that humans are also predators on goats — some rustling for food, but others killing for the fun of it, as a prank, to get even with the owner, or for some other misguided reason.