Loose mineral..."if it's red, it's dead."

[Griffin's Ark]

CM I am using 30 ml of Red Cell per adult goat and usually 20ml for kids over 25lbs. Anybody that is sick gets red cell along with anything else they need. It has been the best thinkg that I have done this year. I would much rather learn here than the old fashioned way... The "another one died today" Method. This mineral bandwagon is one I need to jump on now though. Get 'em healthy and keep 'em healthy. If I charged myself minimum wage for what I do all day with goats I would be broke!


Chris

 

[lupinfarm]

May as well say, my goat mineral is actually dairy cow mineral and it is brown/gray and really nice stuffs! ...

 

[cmjust0]

CM I am using 30 ml of Red Cell per adult goat and usually 20ml for kids over 25lbs.

A single dose, or do you hit them with 20 or 30ml for several days in a row?

I ask because I think I read somewhere a long time ago that the common adult dosage was 15ml/day for a solid week...or something like that, I really can't remember.

I would much rather learn here than the old fashioned way... The "another one died today" Method.

Me too.

Hey...lemme ask you this...with as much copper as their is in Red Cell, and with copper being a natural anthelmintic, do you reckon the pink that comes back to their eye has anything to do with the Red Cell maybe deworming the goat as well as replenishing some lost iron? Just curious..

I'd love to see someone do an FEC, then hit a goat with Red Cell, then do another FEC and see if it drops.. Bet it would.

 

[cmjust0]

May as well say, my goat mineral is actually dairy cow mineral and it is brown/gray and really nice stuffs! ...

Sounds nice... Care to share the make and model with us?

 

[Roll farms]

I've got a skinny nub w/ pale eyelids I've been giving 15-20 ml...3 days in a row, then I'll check her eyelids again in a week and continue as needed.
I ALSO gave her valbazen 3 days in a row.
I don't think they'd absorb the copper fast enough to ALSO act as a dewormer (at least not as fast as I'd like), but I do know if you KEEP the copper levels up, they don't get as wormy. She was the smallest doe in the pen this summer, therefore didn't get as much access to the mineral feeder / top dressed feed as the fat chicks did.
She's the only one from that pen w/ pale eyelids.

For what it's worth, our mineral is red, and I haven't been able to find a better one so I add kelp to their feed, and copper sulfate to their water and mix it in w/ the mineral. Started that last year w/ good results. I do it 2 mos. on, 2 mos. off and watch their coats...hair LOSS would help indicate toxicity.

 

[cmjust0]

I'm not sure exactly how copper kills worms.. By that, I mean does the copper act on the worm from the outside in, or from the inside out? Like...when the copper hits the exterior body of the worm as it passes through the GI, does the worm die, or does the copper get absorbed from the GI into the bloodstream, then into the worm through the blood, thereby killing the worm from the inside out?

I have a suspicion that it's an inside-out, through the blood kind of a deal, but I'm not sure..

My suspicion came from some reading I was doing on copper toxicity.. I've known for a long time that copper was stored in the liver, but I had no clue how/when it was released.. Then I read that sheep -- not goats, but close -- are apparently prone to release a bunch of copper from the liver under stress, which can precipitate acute copper toxicity -- even though they may have been consuming elevated levels of copper for a long time! It seems that they literally store fatal amounts of copper in the liver, then dump it all at once and die. Smart, huh?

Anyway, one of the stressors mentioned was pregnancy! Apparently, lots of chronic copper toxic goats go acute during pregnancy and kick the bucket...

I found that to be very, very interesting.

Reason being, it's been widely accepted for years that goats are prone to 'hold' worms while they're pregnant, then begin shedding a blue million directly after parturition.. Well, anybody knows that you can't "hold" a worm, given that worms have life spans and cycles like anything else.. I suspect they're pretty much either there sucking blood and making eggs to be passed out in the feces, or they aren't there...that's an assumption, of course, but it's one I feel pretty confident about.

Now, if stress causes a goat -- like sheep -- to release copper, and pregnancy is just such a stressor, then perhaps it makes sense that the blood copper levels are elevated during pregnancy...to give copper to the fetuses, perhaps, I dunno...which gives her super parasite resistance while gestating.

Anyway...so, yeah.

Almost forgot where I was going with this but the point is that my suspicion tends toward copper killing worms from the inside out, through the blood they're ingesting.

So....there's a theory for ya.

Now I've just gotta figure out why I just wrote all that.. I'm sure it was in response to something in a really roundabout way, but at the moment...no clue.



I've either had too much caffeine today, or not enough..can't decide which.

 

[lupinfarm]

And animal *can* "hold" worms, CM, they form in cysts in the gut and can camp out for a period of time until the conditions are right for them to explode into a fury of worms, you see this a lot in horses.

 

[lupinfarm]

OH also, I'll have to see if I can find the bag from my mineral... I put the mineral in a tote box for storage because my cat kept trying to eat it LOL. I put friggen everything in tote boxes or garbage bins. My kitchen is filled with different types of feed right now because the EE chicks are taking up my feed store in the chicken coop, and I have no feed store for goat or horse feed (I think I need to build a feed house?)

I know it's by Purina, and it's a high quality Dairy mix.

 

[cmjust0]

And animal *can* "hold" worms, CM, they form in cysts in the gut and can camp out for a period of time until the conditions are right for them to explode into a fury of worms, you see this a lot in horses.

Well, dang.. Did a little more research (...always more research...) and found that female barberpole worms are sensitive to hormone changes in pregnant does, which leads to massive amounts of eggs being shed just about the time the kid hits the ground...ya know...so the kid can die of worms.

Awesome.

Blows my theory all to crap...back to square one for me, I suppose.

Glad you made me do the legwork, though...now I'm just a tiny bit smarter than I was a few minutes ago, and it's all your fault.



I will eventually figure out exactly how copper kills worms. I have to know....it's a borderline obsession at this point..

 

[lupinfarm]

Hahahaha...

Also, moms can pass routine worms on to the baby through her milk. If left untreated the worms can actually implant themselves in the boob and jump off at any time. At that point, I believe the worms are untreatable because they have implanted in the flesh.