Tag: polio

I am relatively new to goats. This spring will be our third kidding season. As I reflect back on 2020, two success stories stand out, and I wanted to post about them to give hope to others, and give thanks to God, Who enabled us to bring full healing to two of our kids.

Listeriosis and polio in goats are both deadly diseases, left untreated. They present with nearly identical symptoms, so the typical approach is to treat for both of them simultaneously. Listeriosis can cross to humans, so you need to wash hands after treating sick goats. In case you’ve never had either of these, I’ll briefly define them.

“Listeriosis is caused by the bacterium Listeria monocytogenes and is commonly seen in cooler climates [though our first case was in August]. These bacteria can be found in the soil, food sources, and even the feces of healthy animals. Most commonly, this disease of sheep and goats is observed as a result of feeding moldy or spoiled hay or silage.”

You treat listeriosis with massive amounts of penicillin, given in shots. Because these bacteria cause a neurological disease yielding deadly paralysis, you need to push the bacteria-killing penicillin past the brain/blood barrier to defeat it. Some people give the shots every six hours around the clock. Our vet directed us to give it twice a day, AM/PM.

We didn’t have moldy hay in our barn, but our goats forage daily in a large pasture, so in the humid days of late summer, our 10-week-old kid, Dandy Lion (right), could have gotten it in the field.

Or… he could have had polio. “Polioencephalomalacia (polio) in ruminants is caused by a thiamine deficiency and/or sulfur toxicity. Other causes include improper feeding, feeding too much grain, or anything that disrupts the health and well being of rumen microbes, such as chronic or acute acidosis or indigestion.”

The treatment for polio is to give large doses of Thiamine (a type of vitamin B) injected sub-Q. Polio is relatively easy to cure if caught early, but since both of these diseases present the same, and it’s important to act immediately, we treated Dandy for both simultaneously, under the direction of our vet.

We think that nine-month old Bridget (left) was possibly stressed by being forcibly weaned, and that her stress brought on her susceptibility to her listeriosis/polio battle.

I felt really badly that two of our animals came down with this disease within a few months of each other, and I earnestly asked my vet if my management was at all at fault, and he said “No. These bacterium are everywhere.”

Symptoms and Treatments for Dandy Lion

So, if you’ve never seen it, what are the symptoms of listeriosis/polio?

With Dandy, during morning chores one day, I noticed that my normally bouncy, friendly little buckling was sleepy and listless. He looked punk; he looked “off.” I noted it, thinking it might be coccidia, and moved on.

But, that night on barn cam, he was standing with his head jammed into a crook in the goats’ sleeping benches. When I went up at 2 AM to help him (thinking he was actually stuck) he stumbled away from me as if drunk and dug his head sideways into another corner.

We waited until daybreak, and then contacted mentors and our vet. After gaining an ides of what it was, we started pumping penicillin and thiamine into him.

Since he was young and really bad, we also had to tube feed him. It takes about 4-7 days of treatment fo them to be fully healed, so they need to be hydrated and fed, or the disease will win.

The idea of tube feeding terrified me at first. Our vet talked us through the process by phone, but it was watching YouTube videos that really helped us out.

We found that, in practice, with a 10-week-old kid tube feeding is not hard, especially if the kid is really out of it. If you mistakenly get the tube down the windpipe (which we never did) they cough. If they don’t cough, you’re good!

We ended up tube feeding this little guy four times a day, giving him four ounces of milk each time. It got to be routine, amazingly, and now I can do it easily. But starting it was scary. I’m just writing this to say: YES, you can if you must!

We also made Dandy into a little pin cushion: we gave him 10 ccs of penicillin morning and evening for about five days. I hated it; but again, the alternative was death.

Part of Dandy’s response to his pain was to STAND for three straight days (as in the picture above) with his head jammed in a corner. He would NOT lie down to rest. We tube fed him, isolated him to a small area for his safety, and gave him shots for four to five days (I can’t remember the exact number).

PLEASE NOTE: We isolated Dandy for his safety. You do NOT have to quarantine for these diseases since the bacteria are everywhere. However, we did use gloves and wash hands because Dandy was drooling and listeriosis does cross to humans.

At nights, we put his mom in with him for comfort. She needed to go out during the day to eat, but at nights we put him in with her. He would try to nurse but not be able to suck the teat because his brain had lost that connection. He would need to re-learn it, or not be able to drink, and thus live.

I watched him day and night (on my barn cam) and he never layed down. This worried me. After he’d been on his feet for three days straight, I decided to just FORCE his little body to rest. I sat in this chair for three hours on the fourth day and just let him sleep in my lap. I also did the same that afternoon for more than an hour. He really did seem to get better from that time on, and that night I saw him lie down with his mom.

After about five days of treatment, Dandy was definitely on his feet and moving around normally, but he still couldn’t nurse his mom. This worried me so much! He did start eating hay, but wasn’t nursing. I worried about dehydration.

Finally, on the sixth day, I saw Dandy take a LONG drink from a bucket of water and I dissolved into happy tears. He was old enough to wean from milk and eating hay. If he could drink from a bucket, he would live without tubing.

As it turns out, one of the strengths of the mammalian brain is that it can reroute itself to re-learn tasks that are lost from injury to the brain. So it was with Dandy. We kept him another two weeks beyond what we would normally have before he went to his new home, and in about 10 days, he had figured out how to nurse again! (It was just in time for us to send him home with his new family, and he had been trained to the bottle, so they were able to baby him with milk feedings for another month to help him regain his lost weight.)

Symptoms and Treatment for Bridget

We knew something was badly wrong, and began immediately with the penicillin and thiamine. We contacted our vet, and he agreed on the treatment.

Bridget was much older than Dandy had been, and it was fall, where the foliage was dying down. She was too old for us to safely tube, and she was not as sick as Dandy had been, in terms of behavior. She was walking, eating, and drinking. She just could not put her tongue in, and her cud got caught in her cheek.

In her case, we asked our vet to come out and make sure that it wasn’t a dental issue, or maybe a thorn caught in her cheek or throat. He checked her thoroughly and determined that it was most probably early listeriosis/polio.

Thus, Bridget became our second pincushion for another week or so. She was eating and running with the herd the whole time we were treating her. She had plenty of energy. She never had the twisting of the neck or the dazed “out of it” expression. She laid down with her mom at night, and also ate out of the manger from time to time at night on cam.

The issue with her was that, each morning, in the bedding (and also in the mineral dishes) we found regurgitated cud. LOTS of it. At first I thought it was scours, but then I would see her poop normal, black goat berries, and this “scour” had texture to it and was very green and didn’t smell bad. It finally dawned on us that it was drool! All night long, as Bridget chewed her cud and sought to process her food normally, her mouth paralysis was preventing her from swallowing her cud back down to where her the rest of her digestive system could finish processing it. We worried about her losing weight day by day and bought an animal-size scale.

We started to weigh Bridget and found that she was losing weight. Though her rumin could process 80% of the fatty acids of her feed through its walls (thus, she was not dying quickly), we were thinking that if she became weak or wasted away to pitiful proportions, we would have to put her down. Having fought so hard for her, and having a lot invested in her bloodlines, I was really sad and praying hard for her to be healed. Morning by morning, there were several large piles of cud drool in her bedding, and on her mom’s back from sleeping near each other, and some in those mineral dishes. SIGH. (It was both gross and discouraging.)

Having seen Dandy’s brain reconnect, though, I kept waiting to see if her brain would repair the paralysis damage. But, I also worried that it was taking so long. After six weeks of drooling illness, I was seriously thinking of putting her down, and really depressed about it. At that point, though, Eliya Elmquist really encouraged me that one of her does had taken a LONG time to recover from listeriosis. This gave me peace to wait on the Lord to see what would happen, and to simply give it to Him.

On Christmas morning (almost 8 weeks since she had first sickened), I went up to do morning chores and mucking. I came to Bridget’s bed with a pitchfork, ready to put her drool piles into my muck bucket. There was almost no drool!! Excited, I told Scott about it and waited for the next morning… no drool!!!! I was SO HAPPY and excited. She has been drool-free since Christmas Day.

After a few days of not seeing drool, we weighed Bridget. She had gained 10 pounds in two weeks from her last weigh in! We were SO SO grateful to God for His grace in creating that mammalian brain that had been re-routed to allow Bridget not only to live, but to re-learn how to swallow her cud. Bridget will probably make a full recovery and be bred next fall.

We are thankful, and I hope that this post will encourage you in any battles with listeriosis/polio to hang in there and wait on that amazing mammalian brain if your goat has some lasting after effects.