Don't know why, but younger animals always seem to be more susceptible. If you have an animal go down due to worms, you should probably follow what your vet is doing--treat the worms, then you may need to give them some support treatment while they recover internally from the infestation.

Best course is not to have them go down in the first place. Make sure you follow the directions completely for the wormer you are using--you may need to treat continuously for several days to keep the level of wormer high enough for long enough to treat the worms. If they only get a weak shot, you'll build immunity to the point that the wormer doesn't work at all.

In addition, rotate wormers periodically. The same treatment every time will leave the resistant worms to increase until the wormer has no effect. When you rotate, make sure the active ingredient is from a different chemistry than the one you are using and not just a sister chemistry. Use as many wormer families as you can. You might consult with your vet on this and get his recommendation and rates.

Finally, the best way to prevent this problem is to avoid a heavy worm infestation in the first place. Normally, worms release their eggs which are excreted by infected animals. It takes 10-14 days for the eggs to hatch and the larval worms to move onto blades of grass or where the animals will pick them up. If you break this cycle, you can significantly reduce your worm problems and need to treat. After the animals have been in a pasture for 10 days, move them to fresh feed that hasn't had any animals on it for at least 2 weeks. It's trickier if they are corraled all the time, but try the same thing--rotate pens periodically. Once cold weather arrives with good freezing temperatures, the new worms will not survive the frosts to re-infect the herd and you will be in pretty good shape for the winter.

As a rule, you are pretty safe in assuming that ALL of your herd is infected. Treating lowers the levels, but doesn't entirely eliminate the worms so you can count on them re-infecting again. You just have to try to break the cycle and periodically worm with a rotation of wormers.

Also, check with your vet and make sure you don't have tape worms or something else that the standard worm medicines really don't kill. You may need to clean up your herd with something else. Good luck!

I don't have livestock so you can toss my thoughts in where they belong. Here's what I have heard, and read, from people who seem to be doing okay with their livestock.

These people have noticed that some of their animals do not get worms. Some do and some don't. They started making notes and culling the animals and the offspring of those that seemed to be susceptible. After a few generations, they have been able to stop worming.

Then the graziers noticed that when they stopped worming, the dung beetles returned to their pastures. I know people who are old enough to remember seeing dung beetles. Apparently Ivomec has a persistence in the dung that kills dung beetles. In large fields the beetles returned in swarms large enough to darken the dawn sky. They returned in numbers high enough to remove and bury all the dung in 24 hours. Considering that the gestation period of the parasites is 3-4 days, any surviving parasite larvae emerge up to 10 feet underground with no animals to infect. So even if the animals on the surface were susceptible, with no wormer the parasites tended to be far underground if they survived at all.

Another method reported to work is to move the large animals from pasture to pasture on a daily basis and bring chickens into each pasture at the 3-day mark after the large animals leave. The chicken application rate is one chicken per large animal unit. The waiting period maximizes the size of the parasite eggs or hatched larvae. The chickens know all about where to get these little protein sources. They claw through the dung piles like a football team with a pizza. The dung gets scattered over a larger area and the pests are all carefully picked out. This is reported to work against fly larvae to reduce the fly population, also.

I know this isn't the way your daddy did it, but it might be the way your grand daddy did it.

we had a really wet spring and early summer, people were loosing goats everywhere to the worms, we lost several, we had been worming. talked to a friend that has had goats for years, she came up with this concoction and it worked like a charm.
3 oz of sul-met
3 oz of thyamine (B1)
3 oz of ivermax
add the above to 5 gallon water, (take all other source of water away) we kept them on it for 1 1/2 wks or so,
when you do this we also wormed them with cydectin we gave it orally 8cc to large ones, like your bucks, 6 cc orally to the mid size, like the nannies, and 3 cc to the small one like the kids, of course what i stated above is probably not listed on the labels on the meds, but i can tell ya with personal experience, it worked.

Your vet should know what wormer is working best for your area. Here in Texas, with the wet spring and early summer, we had a problem with our usual wormer becoming ineffective. I raise alpacas, but they share the same parasites as goats. The goat breeders and alpaca breeders in our area had used Cydectin (moxidectin)or ivermectin, but they no longer worked. We had to switch to Levamisole, an older wormer, not generally used in years. I have dung beetles, but I still had a parasite problem. My vet said the herd can re-infect within 21 days, so I now worm every 3-4 weeks until we get some freezing temps to knock the parasites back. I can use Levamisole up to about 30-45 days before they are due, and the moms get wormed again the day they deliver. If you wait till they go down to treat for parasites, it can be too late. You have to keep on top of it all the time. To rebuild the blood, you can give them Red Cell, a blood booster tonic. If I have use multiple wormers in severe cases, to help their stomachs recover, I use U-7 by FrontLine, a gastric supplement. Both can be found in the equine section of your feed store.

What you snould also do is, in the spring use one kind or wormer, then in the fall use another kind. That way the goat does not get use to that kind each time. It works well for me. I lost one goat, two years ago from over load, and had two other ones down with the same worms, it took alot of time and money to learn the hard way. But, I have not had any trouble from then on! Wormers like Detomax, and Ivomec, anything that you can give to the goats.
littlereo