CL In Goats

If the abcess has opened, put on gloves and take a sample of the draining pus. Put the sample in a baggy and have it tested. This way you will have a quick test.

Do not use the buck while the abcess is open. There are other abcesses that are not CL, especially in sheep. Shearing nicks can cause abcesses, as can foxtails that get trapped and burrow through wool to the skin. That said, if any of our goats threw out what looked like an abcess lump, they were isolated and at the auction yard the next day.

To be safe, I would test the whole herd every year, for CL, Johne's, and of course, CAE. Then cull religiously. I have never heard though that meat goats were especially prone to CL more so than any other breeds. Sheep can also get CL, although abcesses on sheep are not always CL. UC Davis is a good lab. We used to use Washington State for our CAE blood draw testing. Most of the labs will FAX the results to you so you don't have to wait for a snail mail report.

Ridgetop said:

I have never heard though that meat goats were especially prone to CL more so than any other breeds.

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I don’t think they are more prone to it, per say. Around here meat goat folks either don’t care, don’t know what it is, or don’t know they have it in their herd. Meat goats are not near as intensively managed as dairy goat herds. Also, around here, very few test for CL as it is, much less meat goat folks. They don’t even test for CAE or Johnes.

That is a shame that people are not willing to test, or don't have the information about these diseases.

Regular abcesses downgrade carcass quality and lower the yield because you have to trim so much away around the abcess site. That is why the meat industry put out advisories on how and where to vaccinate livestock. A vaccination in the wrong place or with dirty equipment can cause an abcess to form in the meat necessitating excess trimming after slaughter. For a while here the slaughterhouses were keeping track of animals with an eye to meat quality. A producer bringing too many animals in with abcesses, injuries, bruising (bloodshot meat), or other carcass problems was downgraded and a penalty charged against his price per lb. Peta aside, that, and illness, is one reason why it is illegal most places to slaughter a downed cow or other animal. Back in the day before cows were tested for tuberculosis, (and mad cow or scrapie was identified as the producer of Jacob-Creutzfeld disease) an "unthrifty" cow would be culled to the butcher. Possibly one reason so many cases of tuberculosis occurred in the early 1800-1900's, even in upper income families.

CL abcesses don't just occur in the areas marked by goat Whisperer on her diagram. Those are just the external sites that can be seen. Caseous Lymphadenitis is a disease that causes infection in the lymph glands. In later stages and in cases where there are no exterior signs, the lymph glands inside the body become infected causing internal abcesses to occur in the udder glands, internal organs, etc. The animal can eventually die from the internal abcesses and the reason will not be known. This is not a nice disease and meat producers should be testing for it.

Thank you everyone for your help I am going to test om other goats for everything as well. He has been separated from the herd all together. I did not purchase him from the same ppl as i did my others so maybe this will help. It is just a hard decision to make when I am trying to get started with my herd and this happens. He was our main breeding billy.