- Okay. Hi, everybody.
Welcome to Integrated Parasite Management
for Small Ruminants.
I'm Betsy Hodge.
I work at Cornell Cooperative Extension
in St. Lawrence County, and I'm going to start
with a little bit of Zoom etiquette
and then go to the parasite PowerPoint.
So it's being recorded tonight, and it's ideal for us
if you keep yourself muted during the talks.
Put your questions in chat or raise your hand,
and somebody will get to you.
If you put 'em in chat,
it helps 'cause we got a couple people
like Tatiana and Kelsey that can monitor the chat
and answer the questions or stop the speaker.
And it'd probably work best if you use speaker view,
which if you go, I can have a little picture here.
Yeah, if you go up in your upper right-hand corner
under view, click on what this says, speaker view, middle.
That means that you'll have the big picture most of the time
and the rest of the people will be little on the side.
And ideally, keep yourself muted.
The little mute looks like a microphone,
and it's normally down in the lower left-hand corner,
and also your video is there, and I don't know.
If your Internet's good enough, you can keep your video on,
(laughs) if not, probably not.
Questions ideally would go in the chat.
If you click on chat, it opens up,
and you can type in your questions, and we can all see them.
You can also try raising your hand under reactions.
Okay, let me stop sharing that.
(clears throat) Excuse me. I gotta find my PowerPoint.
And we'll get in slideshow here.
There we go.
So we'll begin with Parasite Management for Small Ruminants,
and I'm gonna do part, and Tatiana Stanton,
also from Cornell University, is going to join in,
and give yourself a little introduction then, too, Tat.
So there's a lot of great pictures in here and there slides
from a lot of different people
that have done parasite talks,
and we just wanna recognize them here.
So we're gonna talk tonight about parasites
in sheep and goats,
and we're in a great area for raising sheep and goats.
We have a lot of grass and forages,
but we also have a lot of parasites
because we have moisture and we have warm summers,
and it becomes a major challenge
if you're a pasture-based operation.
And most of us really like to use pasture if we can,
and so we need to learn to control
and manage these parasites.
So we're gonna talk about what is the problem,
and this is actually a video I'm gonna click here
so you can see it.
Hopefully you didn't just eat dinner.
So there's actually little worms on here.
See if we can get one. There's one right there.
Yep, those are Haemonchus contortus.
We're gonna talk about those in a minute.
It's a great video.
There's another one.
So we're gonna talk about stomach worms,
and this is what we're looking for
when we do a fecal egg count,
and those ones that are circled are all very similar.
You really can't tell them apart under the microscope.
So chances are you have more than one kind anyways,
but this one over here that's, let me get my pointer back.
This one is the Haemonchus contortus
or the barber pole worm, and as you can see,
it looks very similar to the others.
This one's a little bit bigger,
but otherwise, they look pretty much the same.
So gastrointestinal worms,
most of them have a direct life cycle.
The eggs hatch in the manure of an infected sheep or goat.
The larvae goes through a few malts right on your pasture
and then becomes infected larvae,
which is in turn eaten by a goat or sheep,
and then that is inside them, and when that matures,
it breeds and produces eggs,
which are then shed out onto the pasture again.
So it's a direct life cycle.
There's no snails or insects or dogs
or cats or anything in the middle,
just directly from the pasture to the animal.
And they can tolerate cold temperatures,
and some of them even over winter on pasture in some places,
and it tends to be a pasture barnyard problem,
especially if your pasture is small
and they're regrazing over areas they've been,
and if there's moisture there,
that seems to really keep it going.
There's not too many picked up in the barn.
Your animals aren't necessarily eating off the ground there.
Hopefully they're eating out of a feeder,
and the ammonia gas
from the bedded pack helps discourage their survival.
Sorry, it's a little tricky to find the little arrow. There.
So Haemonchus contortus or the barber pole worm,
it's a blood-sucking parasite
that pierces the mucosa of the abomasum.
That's that true stomach that's part of the ruminant system,
and it causes blood plasma and protein loss
in the sheep or goat.
And this is a barber pole,
for those of you that are too young
to remember what a barber pole looks like,
and this is a barber pole worm.
I think this is the female that you can see the red
and white colors on, pretty fancy looking.
This is the mouth parts that pierce the lining
of the abomasum.
Just give me a minute. I gotta minimize my thumbnails here.
It's originally a parasite of warmer climates,
but it's spread to the Northeast.
I don't know if that's through climate change
or because we moved animals around too much
and brought it along with them.
Has a short generation time, can be less than three weeks,
and it's a heavy egg producer,
so it reproduces very quickly,
especially in the warm damp months of the year.
5,000 to 10,000 eggs each,
and multiply that by all those having babies.
So each worm can consume 0.05 MLs of blood,
which doesn't sound like very much blood
till you multiply it times all those worms,
and a lamb can lose as much as 1/5
of its blood volume in a day.
You can imagine that makes them not feel very well,
and it can invest in kilo host in four weeks.
So the weird thing is you don't see a lot of signs of this.
You're looking at the sheep or goat,
and they don't have diarrhea.
They don't look sick.
They aren't necessarily looking unthrifty.
So how do we know? How do we do about that?
Okay, so the clinical signs
of the barber pole worm infection
are a little different than you might expect.
They're pretty subtle.
An animal can look terrific
and be dying of the barber pole worm,
and I sometimes have people call my office
and say they found an animal dead and they were shocked,
and often, if it's at the right time of year,
it's a good chance it was a barber pole worm.
The primary symptom is anemia, and if you look at this,
this is the eye of a sheep or goat,
and they're pulling down the lower eyelid
and looking at the mucosa right here,
and that's white like a piece of paper,
and it should be nice in pink,
much like the inside of your own eye,
if you look at it in the mirror.
And so this is a very anemic animal, very anemic.
And they may also develop bottle jaw,
which is this loose flap of skin with very liquidy,
it's a floppy thing.
It's not a firm thing.
It's like a floppy sac of fluid under their chin,
and that's a result of the fluid leaking from the blood
and collecting between the mandibles.
There are other things that cause bottle jaw,
but this is pretty classic.
Let me just go back there.
If I can get back.
Anyways, the other sign sign you sometimes see is an animal
that's lagging behind the others,
sign that they are very anemic.
So let's talk about the brown stomach worm.
This used to be the considered the most serious parasite
of sheep and goats in cool climates.
The worm develops in the gastric glands of the stomach,
the abomasum again, and destroys the glands as they grow.
And so that means they're not going
to be able to utilize all their nutrients,
their digestion is gonna be messed up,
affects their appetite, and they do have diarrhea,
and they say they don't eat as well.
They may have weight loss.
Basically, they look pretty unthrifty,
and it's a little easier to see that this
is happening and know when to treat them.
Sorry, I'm just having trouble with the little clicker here.
So I wanna go to the little arrow. There we go.
And there are other strongyles or stomach worms,
and these worms all disrupt the digestion
and absorption of nutrients by damaging the gastric glands
in the abomasum and damaging the lining of the abomasum
or the small intestines.
And the clinical signs are fairly obvious,
what we were just talking about diarrhea, scours,
weight loss, rough hair coat, unthriftiness,
and you can see down in the corner here,
you can see what some of those eggs look like.
They all look basically the same.
The only way you can tell is through special dyes
or assays that most of us do not have the facilities to do.
And here are their names.
I'm not gonna even try to do them, (laughs)
but they're all out there,
and it's hard to know which one you have.
Fortunately, most of the dewormers,
they get most of the other ones of this type of worm.
And then they're strongyloides.
So strongyloides is similar,
and we had an outbreak of this end of last summer, fall,
and it's an intestinal thread worm or pin worm.
It's not like the dog and cat species.
It does not affect people, which is nice, better. (laughs)
It does have a complicated life cycle because it
can reproduce sexually or asexually,
and it can infect animals in several different ways.
It can infect them by ingestion
from the manure in the pasture, from the dam's milk
if the larvae migrate to her utter.
So the babies can be getting it there.
Through the skin besides
and the hairline just above the hoof.
So if it's muddy, which most of us have had a lot
of mud here recently until the last few days
when it's been really nice, and if the pasture's infected
or it's in the manure and it can get along the edges
of their hooves, it can actually get in through the skin,
and it can get in prenatally
if the larvae have migrated to the placenta.
So they're pretty crafty, little buggers.
And the larvae are sensitive to cold and dryness,
but of course, all summer, we have mostly heat and wetness,
and the symptoms are diarrhea,
a good chance that there'll be diarrhea.
They could die from it, although most people would,
I think, pick up on the signs before that.
If the lungs are infected by the migrating larvae,
they may be some coughing or pneumonia.
So it's a pretty nasty thing.
We didn't have a lot up in our particular flock last summer,
but I know Tatiana saw some
with flocks she was working with.
- [Tatiana] Yeah, we saw a lot in flocks,
and the egg is very easy to tell apart
from those strongyle those eggs.
It's a smaller, and it usually has formed larvae
in it instead of just a nucleus.
- Right.
So this is a totally different family of worms,
the tapeworms, looks a lot like linguini or fettuccine,
and it's one of the few worms you can see in the manure.
So it doesn't necessarily look like this in the manure,
and a lot of times in the manure,
it looks a lot like pieces of rice.
So these come apart in little segments.
This looks like white rice mixed with the manure.
Once in awhile,
you have a lamb with a big long one hanging out,
which is really great when you're giving tours.
We give tours at the extension farm,
and those are the sort of the things you dread
while you're giving tours.
The life cycle, the worms live in the small intestines,
and they pass out with the feces,
and the egg is eaten by a pasture mite.
So the egg hatches in the mite,
and the mite is eaten by the sheep or goat.
You probably didn't even know there
were mites on your pasture.
I know I didn't, and you can't really see them out there,
but they're out there,
and they're an important part of this life cycle.
Light loads of tapeworms tend not to be a problem.
They build up a resistance to them,
so you almost never see them in the adults,
tend to see them only in the lambs.
And at least where I live,
you tend to see them the end of June into July,
showing up in the lamb manure,
but you can have stations, and that can cause problems,
and it's a good reason to vaccinate your lambs
and young goat kids with CDT because sometimes,
they build up an infection in the small intestine
from all the worms in there.
I don't know if it's the worms dissolving or what it is,
but I have opened up a lamb
and pulled out piles and piles of worms.
- [Tatiana] So Betsy,
what it is is this tape worm is actually fairly starchy.
So it's just like the animal eating a bunch
of corn or something that the bacteria
in the small intestines that work on starch multiply
and put out a toxin, put out that-
- Yeah, so it is like overeating disease.
- [Tatiana] So basically they get overeating disease.
- Right, which CDT is a vaccination for.
So I sometimes do treat my lambs
if it looks like a very big infestation,
but I also have left them and it looks pretty bad,
but they did okay.
It's a different class of wormers.
Not all dewormers get tapeworm,
so if you're trying to treat for tapeworm,
make sure you have a dewormer that works for that,
and we'll talk about that in a little while.
So here's our picture again
of the different eggs and larvae,
and we're gonna talk about lungworm,
which you don't see the eggs of but you see the larvae.
So lungworms have an indirect cycle through a snail.
You're gonna find out that snails
are a big problem for sheep and goats.
And so they have indirect life cycle through a snail
or a direct life cycle, certain ones, and a, sorry.
I was up late lambing last night.
Severe infestation cause coughing,
fluid in the lungs, and pneumonia.
So the cases I've had, the animals cough a lot
but don't act sick, at least not at first,
and it's excreted as larvae, not an egg in the feces.
So if you take a fecal sample,
ideally you'd take it direct from the animal
so you don't pick up something
from the ground that looks similar.
And the ones I've seen have this typical curly Q.
I may have been seeing others, too,
but these I could recognize.
And fortunately, the same medicines
that get the stomach worms and intestinal worms
will get the lungworms.
I did actually have a llama
and a ewe go down on Christmas Eve.
Of course, vets love it when you call 'em on Christmas Eve,
and I don't blame them, and fortunately,
they were able to advise me over the phone,
and I treated with dewormer, and everybody survived fine,
but the ewe never really got over the coughing,
and I ended up culling her in the long run.
So it's out there, and for awhile, we treated every fall,
but we don't like to treat all the animals
in the flock at once, which we'll talk about again later.
And so I don't do that anymore,
but I keep an eye out for it.
It tends to hit later in the fall,
or the actual symptoms tend to show up later
in the fall, at least in my area.
So let's talk about liver flukes.
There's three kinds of liver flukes,
and they're in the liver,
and some farms in the Northeast have acute
or chronic liver fluke populations,
and if they're in your area, that's not good.
You'll need to watch for them and treat for them.
It does require water
or at least very damp conditions and snails.
They can kill.
You can kill adult liver flukes with albendazole,
which you might know that as Valbazen,
or Ivomec Plus, which has clorsulon,
but you can't kill the immature flukes.
So meanwhile, these immature flukes
are traveling around in the livers,
making them feel terrible.
So let's talk about a little more in detail.
So the indirect life cycle has a snail
or a snail and intermediate host.
So Fasciola hepatica, this is the sheep liver fluke,
and I don't know.
Do these affect goats the same,
or is that just a sheep thing?
- [Tatiana] Betsy, Fasciola hepatica isn't supposed
to be west or east of the Mississippi River.
- I know that, but the vet and Brazier Falls
has found them in somebody's sheep here, so.
- [Tatiana] Right, but they never know
if it's sheep that actually were shipped here
and had it when they were shipped here.
They're still the-
- But they don't live in the wild, you're saying.
- [Tatiana] On that, but yeah,
it affects goats the same way it affects sheep.
- Okay. - You get chronic infection.
- So hopefully you're not getting this
and not bringing it into your flock either.
Fascioloides magna or the deer fluke.
I bet everybody here has deer on their farm,
unfortunately, or the sheep and goats
'cause they carry the deer liver fluke.
It does not bother the deer or the elk.
However, one fluke can kill a goat or sheep due
to its extensive migration round in the liver,
and it travels all around,
and I'll show you some pictures of some livers in a moment,
and you can see the damage that gets done.
And then there's the- - And Betsy,
it's primarily in deer populations
in the Catskills and the- - Adirondacks.
- [Tatiana] And I don't know if that just means
that they shed so few that,
unless you're in our super heavy deer population,
it's not much of a problem.
But I know like in my area where we do have a lot
of white-tailed deer,
it isn't thought to be much of a problem.
So I think it's just more, for some reason,
maybe the conditions in the,
you need more of those mountainous moist conditions
for it to really thrive.
But Catskills and Adirondacks are really bad,
and your local veterinarian will almost always know
if you're in a bad liver fluke area.
- I know they had them in the cows as well.
- [Tatiana] Yeah.
- The lancet fluke is not a health problem very often,
but it does cause the livers to be condemned
at the slaughterhouse sometimes.
- [Tatiana] And that one is throughout New York, the lancet.
- So here's a little more details.
The hepatica is the common liver fluke.
We were just saying used to assume it
was not east of the Mississippi,
but some veterinarians have observed some affected animals
in New York.
The life cycle includes freshwater snails,
causes acute peritonitis to the liver
while it migrates around in there.
I don't know how they know where they're going,
but they go all around in the liver.
Often causes chronic wasting problems afterwards,
and you can see bottle jaw from that.
That's the hypoproteinemia and anemia.
And the Fascioloides magna. This is the deer fluke.
Here we go, found in Adirondacks and Catskills.
Got a little ahead of ourself there.
It is a natural parasite of the deer and elk,
and in the sheep and goats,
that it's an abnormal host, and it never matures.
It just stays in the tiny larval stage,
but it continues to migrate around through the liver
and into the abdominal cavity.
And the good news is they don't spread it
to each other at that point.
It is acute and it can kill them,
and you'll see why in a minute.
Here's the liver of a goat killed by deer fluke.
When you think of what liver oughta look like,
it should be smooth and reddish brown,
and it shouldn't be all full of all this scar tissue
and hamburgery-looking stuff.
And interestingly, if you can save these animals,
their liver will actually improve.
So treatment for liver flukes,
I'm gonna actually go to the next slide
and come back to this one
'cause I wanna show you this liver.
Unfortunately, this is my kitchen sink
and liver from some of my sheep.
And we had lost a bunch of sheep,
15 ewes out of about 105 or 110 sheep,
between October and Christmas.
But while we were trying to figure out what was going on,
did a whole lot of necropsies on top of the manure pile
when it was about five degrees out, and they were actually,
the ones that were dying, I was mostly finding dead.
Like in the morning, the sheep would all get up to eat,
and there would be one dead on the floor,
and they were dying from this Black's disease
or Clostridium novyi that the liver flukes
were dragging around through the liver.
And you can see other organs like stuck
to the liver with fibrin, fibrinogen.
So the whole insides were irritated and stuck together.
We actually used Vision 7, but you can use Covexin 8,
something that's got Clostridium novyi protection,
and we treated them also with the Valbazen
and with clorsulon as per Mary Smith's,
Dr. Mary Smith from Cornell's instructions.
And we stopped it,
but it was pretty scary when it was happening
'cause it took a little while to figure out.
And we did save some that had it
but didn't get the Clostridium,
and they were like standing with their head
in the feeder but not eating.
So they had appetite and they felt terrible,
and we were able to recover those
with a lot of TLC and nursing,
and they did actually recover and become productive again.
What do you do about liver flukes?
So you can try to fence off wet areas
and stay out of the swamps.
So I think the way we got them is I was trying to be nice,
and I fenced in the corner of the woods
so that the sheep would have shade.
They were in a pasture quite a ways from the barn,
long ways from the barn, actually,
and I think in the process,
the trees kept it damp and there
were a lot of snails under there.
So trying to avoid those areas.
You're not really doing the sheep of favor
or goats by getting 'em into those places.
Along hedgerows is the same way,
those places where you have that real tall reed canary grass
that can sometimes have a lot of snails also,
places where the sun doesn't hit.
It is harder to kill the larvae than the adult flukes,
and the deer worm does not become an adult fluke,
so that's a problem.
We use albendazole, which you may know as Valbazen,
and you'll have this handout.
So you'll have the actual dosages.
- [Tatiana] And Betsy, one thing to point out
that I remember when you had it, initially,
you couldn't use the Valbazen because you had pregnant ewes
in early right gestation that you
didn't wanna accidentally abort.
And so you were searching for the Ivomec Plus at that point.
- Right. - Usually.
- And especially, we were giving the Valbazen
at like five times the normal dose.
And, of course, we did find Ivomec Plus,
which we gave them along with the big thing
was the vaccine, I think, really is what saved most of them.
This is the Fascioloides is the deer fluke here.
I think I had one this fall with it also.
She was really sick for a long time,
and I nursed her through it.
Oh, coccidiosis.
Coccidiosis is a little different,
tends to be in an inside parasite
as less than a pasture parasite.
It's a single-celled protozoa,
and it damages the lining of the small intestines,
which means they are not gonna absorb nutrients as well,
and tends to happen around three weeks old
or three weeks or a little older,
and you might have heard it called mucky butt in lambs,
makes this really dark-colored, icky diarrhea.
And it spreads so easily in the infected feces
and in the bedding and around the barn.
So you know how baby animals gotta put their mouth
on everything on every feeder
and they're always putting their mouth on stuff
on the ground and like tasting it?
And that's so easy to pick up the coccidia,
and it is real typical in young animals.
So this is an intestine and these little white spots
or white foci in the intestinal wall,
that's where the absorption is impaired,
and it can damage both the small and the large intestine,
which means they aren't gonna be able
to absorb nutrients very well.
And I don't know, it seems like that lasts a long time,
even if you treat them,
that they often don't thrive as well as they should.
So it's species specific.
So many of the Eimeria species are host specific,
and there is immunity to the species
of coccidia as they get older and have exposure.
So it's best if they have mild exposure at first
so they don't get an acute case.
And you wanna avoid sudden exposure to large amounts
of infected feces, like taking small animals into a spot
that's had a lot of adults, for example.
They're more vulnerable when they're stressed,
when they're young, when they're really old,
when they're weaned.
Anything that's in a stressful situation
is more vulnerable to coccidia
and really to most of the parasites as well.
So it tends to be when they're housed together
in a smaller space.
So if you can lower the density of your animals, that helps.
It also helps things stay drier,
and that helps keep the coccidia down.
There's some other tricks, too, I think we have here.
Likes warmth and moisture,
and it can go from egg to infectious
in just one or two days.
Is also oval looking when you look on a slide,
but it's quite a bit smaller than the stomach worms,
and it's killed by the sunlight and low humidity,
so if you can have a sunny area in your barn.
I have a greenhouse barn,
so it tends to be very bright,
and the bedding tends to be dry,
which is a big plus.
Might be the only plus of the greenhouse barn,
but it is definitely a plus.
But none of us have animals that go in the feeder, right?
(laughs) I know.
They love to get in the feeder, stand in there,
poop in there, and that's how it spreads.
Yeah, here we go.
I actually can't read the top of the slide,
but we wanna keep the young animals
away from the adults where we can.
If possible, separate 'em by age.
So only have a two-week spread in age in the group.
So if you have your lambing or kidding
is spread out over a long time,
you're gonna have newborns being born
when you have three or four-week-old animals
that might have coccidia infecting each other,
so to keep that in mind if you can.
Milk is protective.
So weaning is a very high risk time for coccidia.
It's stressful, and then they don't have the milk as well.
And again, clean, dry, if you can get sunlight,
and be especially careful at weaning.
Do we have something in here about the...
Yeah, the additives. Here we go.
- [Tatiana] Or Betsy,
if I can just tell a little case study.
- Sure.
- [Tatiana] Okay. So if you go back to the previous slide.
So with these dairy goat kids up here,
this was in California where it's fairly dry,
but we were having trouble.
In part, a big problem you can have with dairy kids,
if you're raising 'em on raised flooring,
which initially we were,
and then you put 'em down on the ground
and you're putting 'em down on ground
where you've had adult animals or have had, in our case,
we had had kids that were more like three
or four months old on that ground,
and we did that right at weaning.
And so right at weaning,
the kids got exposed to feces for the first time
because since they'd been on raised flooring,
they hadn't been exposed to feces.
And so right then when they were losing the protection
from milk, they got exposed.
So we'll often say that since weaning is such a high time,
to talk to your veterinarian about
whether there's something you can maybe do a week
before you start weaning for these animals.
And then also keep in mind
that if you're selling bottle kids to people,
those bottle kids, while they're at your farm,
can be doing fine, but they can have been infected
with coccidia, and the stress of moving to a new farm
can have them suddenly have coccidia population multiplying.
On the next slide, when you talk about some
of the chemicals we can use,
you can talk to your veterinarian
about whether you can use some of those.
And otherwise, just let people know what the symptoms are
when they're buying bottle kids and lambs from you
so that they'll be prepared to identify that kind
of diarrhea is not gonna be normal.
Okay, and I'll shut up. - Okay. That's a good point.
If I can get the clicker to work. There we go.
So there are different coccidiostats out there
that can be added to the feed
or the mineral or potentially the water.
And so there's a trick of putting it
in the minerals for the pregnant females
about a month before they start to lamb and kid,
and you can keep it in there
until they're weaning their young,
and that just gets the whole level
of coccidia down in the barn and in the feces.
And there's a couple different things you can use.
There's Bovatech, but not in dairy animals, Rumensin.
I find most of the feeds now that have anti-coccidiostat
and have Deccox.
And then the feed companies like Deccox
'cause it's less toxic to horses, I think.
And there's amprolium or Corid,
which is more of a treatment that you put
in the water or in the milk.
This one is approved for sheep but toxic to equine.
This one is approved for goat, also toxic to equine.
This one is approved for sheep and goats.
That's probably why I see Deccox in most of the feed,
and Corid, again, is a treatment you
can use to put in the water.
I prefer to use it as a drench and apply it directly.
So if you wanna treat it,
there is chemical treatment for coccidiosis.
There's the oral sulfonamides like Sulmet or Albon.
Because of the Veterinary Feed Directive,
they need to use a vet prescription
to use some of these things in the feed,
or you may not be able to be prescribed to use in milk.
I assume this is the milk you're feeding to the babies.
- [Tatiana] Right,
what it is with the Veterinary Feed Directive,
you're not supposed to use an off label.
And so because the labels on these don't mention mixing it
into the milk, some veterinarians will say
that you're not to be mixing it into the milk.
You can mix it into a milk replacer
if you're mixing it into the water first
and then into the milk replacer,
and that comes into being.
Particularly, some people used to be in the habit
of using Sulmet or Albon
for the last five days before weaning.
They would put it in the lamb bar for the lambs
or for the goat kids to just have that coccidia population
that they might've been developed knocked down right
before weaning occurred.
But technically, some veterinarians may say,
"You better not use it that way anymore."
The Corid doesn't fall under the Veterinary Feed Directive,
so there's flexibility on how you can use.
- So there are directions on the Corid
on how to mix it or the concentration,
and I find it works better
if you haven't got 300 lambs to do or something,
if you can dose them for five days
and be sure they all get what they're supposed to get.
I find it works better that way.
Again, none of these really kill off all the coccidiosis.
They tamp it down,
so you need to make sure all the other things
are happening, too, like maybe the pen
is getting cleaned out and clean bedding put in
and it's dry and all the other things
that need to happen to make coccidia go away.
I also like to make sure they have the right minerals,
like selenium, to help their immunity 'cause they're
gonna try to build up an immunity against this,
and you may need
to give them a little supplemental nutrition
or electrolytes if they're having a hard time
with the coccidia, and try to relieve the stress
like at weaning as much as you can.
Oh, we're up to the meningeal worm.
And I think you're gonna talk about this, Tatiana.
Do you want me to stop sharing so you can share?
I can start if she's not there at the moment.
- Or Betsy? - Yes?
- [Tatiana] If you want,
I can just continue using your slides
- Okay. - if That works for you.
But I think somewhere in here,
I may stop sharing just to show some of some resources,
okay? - Okay. Yep.
- [Tatiana] So why don't I, for right now,
just continue on with your slides?
- That would be fine.
- [Tatiana] So we're gonna talk about the deer worm now,
and it's a parasite of white-tailed deer.
In white-tailed deer, it's generally non-pathogenic.
It very occasionally it'll cause problems in 'em,
but for the most part,
it doesn't cause much at all in the way of problems.
And it's the opposite of your barber pole worm
in that this is a worm that your animal
only gets a couple of, just one worm.
One deer worm can cause a lot of damage,
and this worm is extremely long lived in your animal.
It's not thought to reproduce successfully
in sheep and goats,
but one worm can live for six or seven years in an animal,
in a deer, in some of the work they've shown.
And unfortunately, small ruminants are abnormal hosts.
This includes fallow deer if you have a fallow deer farm.
It includes elk and moose and then your llamas, alpacas.
And we have seen cases of very young calves being infected.
If it infects horses,
it shows a whole different symptom in horses.
So generally, the animals we're concerned about
are small ruminants and our camelids
like our llamas and alpacas, okay?
It has an indirect life cycle.
It needs a snail and slug in order
to go through its full life cycle, okay?
So I'm gonna go through what the life cycle is in a deer,
and the deer eats forage that contains a slime trail
from a slug or a snail that has been infected
and is excreting the third stage larva.
It's that third stage larva that's infectious, okay?
And then that larva, after the deer has eaten that forage,
the larva migrates through the stomach wall
into the peritoneal cavity, and from there,
it can get into the lumbar spinal nerves,
so along the short ribs there.
It can get in there, and then it reaches the spinal cord
in about 10 days after first infecting the animal.
And once it gets to spinal cord,
it's gonna become a lot harder to kill
because the dewormer's gonna have
to get through the blood-brain membrane.
And in a deer, it develops in a totally orderly manner
in the gray matter of the spinal cord, okay?
And then at the end of about 40 days,
it comes back to the surface of the spinal cord,
and it matures and it migrates into the brain,
into the cranium, and lives and reproduces there,
and then the eggs are laid into the blood vessels.
Even though this seems really invasive
in the white-tailed deer, it's essentially cohabitation.
They get along just great.
And then the egg hatches in the blood vessels
in the lungs as it travels there
through the blood into first stage larvae,
and then goes into the bronchial tree,
gets coughed up, and the animal reswallows it
when it coughs it up and it passes into the feces,
and these first stage larvae are excreted in the feces.
And so that's what it does in the deer, basically.
And like you, I'm having trouble moving. Okay.
- I have to move 'em for you.
- [Tatiana] It's in the mucous coat there
of the fecal pellets, and it's usually excreted
about 90 days after the deer has been infected.
And these first stage larvae can be killed
by drying or by direct sunlight,
but they resist freezing, unfortunately,
and land snails and slugs then crawl
over that deer feces during the fall or summer.
They crawl over it or in the spring,
and the larva gets into the snail or slug through its foot,
and then it develops in that snail
or slug into the third stage larva.
And this actually takes a pretty long time.
With the snails we raise in the colony at Cornell,
it usually takes about two to three months,
and we have 'em at 70 degrees Fahrenheit.
We have 'em at room temperature.
So in warmer temperature,
it'd probably happen a little faster.
It can stay inside the snail or the slug,
or it can be excreted in the slime trail,
and there are not a lot of these larvae
in any individual snail.
On the studies they've done,
there's usually an average of about three larvae there.
And we actually, with the colony at Cornell,
we have trouble getting them
to produce enough of the larvae.
Even though we infect them pretty heavily,
each snail only really grows out to a third stage larva,
a fairly limited number of larvae.
But unfortunately, as we said,
it doesn't take many of these to really damage your animal.
- I think I'll never look at deer
and snails the same way again.
- [Tatiana] Okay, so unfortunately, as we said,
small ruminants and camelids are an abnormal host.
In a sheep or goat, the larvae travel
from that intestinal tract to the gray matter
of the spinal cord, just the way they did with the deer,
but at this point, they become disoriented.
It's a different spinal cord
than what they evolved to travel through.
And they become disoriented, and, therefore,
they become way more active in there,
trying to figure out just where the hell they are,
and they can cause nerve damage because of this.
And the nerve damage we generally see will be some sort
of lameness or weakness in the hind end,
but it's not always limited to that lumbar region.
You can get it anywhere along the vertebrae.
So the damage can be up at the neck all the way back.
Even though typically we see it in the hind legs
and in the back, we can see the damage
in the front legs occasionally,
and the animal will often slightly drag a hind leg,
or as they're turning, they'll stumble.
Those will be the first signs you see,
and then it can get worse and worse.
The other sign you sometimes see,
and it's not necessarily in the same animals
that show these problems with the way they're moving,
is you can get damage to the nerve cells in the skin,
in the skin layer.
And it'll be under a vertebrae, but again,
it can be under a vertebrae anywhere
from the neck to the tail.
And so the animal, wherever that nerve damage has been
in the skin layer, the animal feels a constant itch,
and the animal will scratch, scratch, scratch
at the same location, and they can rub themselves raw there.
And it can be a little tricky
in that we usually get that right
about the same start of black fly season.
And so you're going, "Okay,
is this sore because of deer worm telling me that,
ooh, I've got a deer worm issue going
on in my herd right now or in my flock right now,
or is this just black flies or no-see-ums?"
Unfortunately with the lameness one,
the lameness one can progress to the point
where the animal's hind legs become completely paralyzed,
and occasionally we will see death
if the nerves that are affected
are affecting the animal's ability to breathe
or if the animal starts laying on one side
and fluid builds up in the lungs on that side
and the animal gets pneumonia.
Very typical for deer worm damage,
unlike a lot of other neurological diseases
like polioencephalomalacia,
goat polio or sheep polio, or listeria,
the animal will typically maintain a really good appetite.
So it'll be really frustrating.
You'll have this animal down that's really eager to eat,
but it can't get up, okay? - And what about blindness?
Isn't that potentially a symptom also?
- [Tatiana] It can affect the brain, and in that case,
you'll get twirly eyes. - Yep.
- [Tatiana] I haven't heard
of anyone getting true moon blindness,
but that doesn't mean you couldn't,
but what we have seen is twirly eyes with it,
but then we usually recommend that people treat
with thiamine as well, just in case it's goat polio,
encephalomalacia instead.
We usually can't rule those out,
but yes, it can affect the brain,
and so because of that,
I could see the possibility of you seeing moon blindness
and actual blindness going on as well, but generally not.
And in horses, I believe,
that is more one of the symptoms you'll sometimes see.
- I know what happens to me is I have it so rarely
that I don't recognize it, and I think,
"Well, this sheep must have got smushed
at the feeder by the other sheep,"
or they look like they're a little drunk or something
and they're wobbly in the back end, and then I realize,
takes me a little bit to realize
that it's probably the deer worm.
- [Tatiana] Okay, great. It moved, (laughs) okay.
- You have to let me know. I'm moving it for you.
- [Tatiana] Okay. Oh, that's right.
Oh yeah, you have control. (laughs) I'm sorry.
Okay, and so up to a few years ago,
there'd been no real controlled studies in sheep or goats.
At Cornell, we did do a three-year study.
It was an informal study, but it did involve a lot of farms.
We actually worked with 16 farms, maybe as many as 16,
but some of the farms said that,
as soon as they enrolled in the study, it was great.
They stopped having issues with deer worm.
So not all the farms had animals
with deer worm during the study.
We chose farms that were in within a 30-mile radius,
I think, of Ithaca, and we chose farms
that had all had experience with deer worm before
because the farmers were gonna have to identify
that they thought the animals had deer worm.
And we looked at two different treatment protocols for it,
and then what we would do is the farmer would call us
and say, "Hey, I've got an animal
that I think has deer worm."
And then the veterinarian would go out there
and do a neurological exam of the animal
and do a scorecard on it,
and the farmer would start the animal
on treatment right away regardless
of whether the veterinarian could get there right away.
And we told some of the farmers to start with treatment A
and some of them to start with treatment B and to rotate.
The first animal they had come down with it
would get treatment A and the next animal
would get treatment B.
And then we would videotape the animals that first day,
and then the vet would come back around five days later
or after the animal had been treated for five days
and videotape the animal again
and video score the animal again.
Next slide.
And our goal in our study was to look to see
whether ivermectin was really needed in the treatment,
and I realize right now I'm talking
about chemical treatments, and in a little while,
I'll talk about what a farm that's certified organic,
what you're up against and what
are some of the things that you can do.
And so we wanted to see whether you needed ivermectin
because theoretically, ivermectin can't pass
through the blood-brain barrier.
So it shouldn't aid in treatment unless the animal's
in the first 10 days of being infected,
and usually in the first 10 days of being infected,
the animal's not gonna show any symptoms.
And so we used the steroid, we used dexamethasone,
and the purpose of that was to try
and control the nerve damage.
It's an anti-inflammatory,
and we wanted to minimize that nerve damage.
And some veterinarians like to use it
at a fairly high dose for five days.
In our case, we used it at a heavy dose for three days
and then dropped the dose to half that.
Just because it is a steroid,
it makes the animal more susceptible
to pneumonia and other issues.
And so if your animal's down and you're not really good
about keeping it on the chest floor,
it's getting on its side,
you may run more risk of pneumonia if you've got it
on the high-level dexamethasone all five days.
But as I said, some veterinarians prefer
to keep it at the high level for five days.
And if you use Banamine instead,
which the active ingredient would be your flunixin,
there's a 60-day withdrawal on that for sheep.
On dex, I don't believe there is a withdrawal.
And then we use fenbendazole, which is supposed to be able
to go through the blood-brain membrane,
and that's sold as Safeguard,
and we were using the oral goat Safeguard on it.
And then for goats that only had a 10-day withdrawal,
even at the super heavy dosages we were using it at,
but at sheep, it had a 54 day.
And then we were using either ivermectin
or an ivermectin placebo that had the medium
that normal ivermectin is in.
We were injecting that medium into the animal.
The vet company was nice enough
to provide us with that medium,
and so we were using it as sub-q for five days,
and we were shocked.
When we went to FARAD,
the Food Animal Residual Avoidance Database,
they gave us a withdrawal period of 96 days
for both goats and sheep, and that's primarily
because of not knowing when it would clear out of the liver.
Okay? So they would be condemning livers.
And so you can see that if you're using this for 96 days
and the animal doesn't recover and you're hoping
to eat the animal yourself or something,
if you use ivermectin, you've made it so that it's
gonna be a long time before you can eat that animal.
Next.
- I just have a question, Tat.
In the dexamethasone, if you have pregnant animals,
is it okay to use? - Okay, okay,
and thank you so much for pointing that out.
The reason we list Banamine here is there's two reasons,
but the main reason why it's listed
is if your animal is in her last month of gestation,
giving them dexamethasone can cause them
to go into early labor,
which you definitely wouldn't be wanting.
So you would not be using a steroid
like dexamethasone on them, okay?
Instead, in those cases,
we use Banamine as our anti-inflammatory.
Another thing is flunixin is permitted.
Your dexamethasone is completely prohibited
for organic animals.
Your Banamine is permitted for pain relief
and also as an anti-inflammatory.
But it's only permitted in the case, I believe,
it's only permitted for breeding stock animals prior
to the last third of gestation and prior
to their nursing lamb or kid
that's gonna be sold for organic meat,
and it is allowed in dairy animals.
You need to be following the label,
and I would definitely say check with V-O-F or VOF
about that prior to using Banamine.
And when it comes to your fenbendazole...
- Sorry. - Yeah.
I guess if we go ahead and talk
about some of the organic stuff now.
So if you end up with a young animal
that's scheduled to go for slaughter
that's showing up with some deer worm signs,
you have to really think about what you wanna do.
Sometimes, these animals will spontaneously recover,
and sometimes when they're in the slight toe dragging stage
or slightly weak in the back stage,
sometimes that stage will take a couple
of weeks to go through before they actually go down.
And so I know in our study, we had some people that,
because that 54-day withdrawal
on the Safeguard for sheep said,
"No way am I treating these young animals with that."
And their custom exempt slaughterhouses
were willing to accept those animals
when they were just slightly dragging on a hind leg,
but it really depends on the slaughterhouse.
If it's a USDA slaughterhouse,
that may appear to be a neurological sign,
and you especially couldn't send one in
with twirly eyes or anything like that.
It's gonna get condemned.
They're not gonna accept it,
and if it's down, it's gonna be condemned.
So it really depends
on what market channel you have available
for getting rid of that animal
and how used that market channel is to deer worm
to dealing with deer worm issues.
And so sometimes the best choice is to just immediately,
when you realize, "Hmm, this animal may have deer worm,"
it seems slightly off on those back legs,
to get it slaughtered as quickly as possible.
Other times, if the animal that's infected
are your breeding does or your breeding ewes
for a meat operation or if you've got a fiber operation
or if these are dairy animals, then you do need
to usually go ahead and do your fenbendazole treatment.
And fenbendazole is allowed in emergency situations.
Ivermectin is no longer allowed in emergency situations,
so you would be deciding whether you
wanna use some Cydectin there instead.
But when I get into the results of the study,
you'll see why often just limiting yourself
to that Safeguard is probably fine.
And so if those breeding stock animals
aren't in the last third of gestation
and aren't nursing lambs and kids right then,
then you can go ahead and treat 'em with fenbendazole,
and they can remain on the farm,
and the same thing with your breeding rams
and your breeding bucks.
That cull ewe or that cull ram
will never be able to be sold as organic meat,
but they can remain on the farm,
and they can produce organic offspring.
And if it's a dairy animal lactating,
I believe it's a 90-day withdrawal
that you would have to follow for milk withdrawal.
And the thing is I know on a lot of farms,
we get infected with deer worm right
as we're starting to breed our animals.
Depending on what time of year you're breeding for
or whether you're practicing outta season breeding,
our biggest incidence of an infection
with deer worm is in the fall, and so often,
you wouldn't have your animals
in the third trimester at that point.
And when it comes to dexamethasone, no,
you absolutely can't use dexamethasone.
So you would be talking to your veterinarian
and to your certification agency
about allowable anti-inflammatories.
So like while you're omega-3 fatty oils,
like your fish oil and your flaxseed oil are high in those,
I'm not sure that they last going through the rumen,
and you would want it to last going through the rumen.
So that's where you might be more looking
at your turmeric and your ginger.
And then also just talking with veterinarians,
if you're working with an herbal consultant,
talking about what anti-inflammatories they recommend
for nerve damage and finding out if those are herbal ones
that are allowed for organic usage or not on livestock.
Okay, and then prevention is gonna be a real big part
of what you're gonna wanna be practicing with a lot of this.
Okay, so basically this was our study.
So Betsy, go ahead to the next slide.
So this is a young ewe here, a yearling with it.
Betsy, can you hit the, yeah, hit that again?
And you can see she's got the typical hind legs dragging.
It's pretty advanced in her.
This isn't an animal that you're gonna get away
with taking to the custom exempt slaughterhouse probably.
Okay?
She's definitely showing her neurologic signs at this point.
And this is that same ewe five days later,
and you can see that she showed a lot
of improvement with chemical treatment,
though sometimes we'll have animals spontaneously
recover as well.
If you've got an animal that's infected
that you do wanna market,
you can certainly go ahead and try.
Your copper oxide wire particles will not be of help
because the deer worm doesn't go to the true stomach, okay?
That's not where it hides out.
It's hiding out in the spinal cord.
And in order for copper oxide wire particles
to kill barber pole worms,
they kill it in the true stomach.
So copper isn't gonna work.
I would not recommend black walnut hulls
because black walnut hulls do cause like laminitis problems
in horses, and if they have a microtoxin or mold on 'em,
they can also cause neurological symptoms in dogs.
And so you're not wanting to use a chemical
that's gonna cause a lot of neurological damage,
whether it's herbal or not.
But I don't know if like Vermatox or something like that.
You could always go ahead and try that.
There's nothing wrong with trying, but basically,
that's the kind of animal you would put in your own freezer
if you're getting to it too late to feel
like your custom exempt slaughterhouse will take it for you.
You can certainly slaughter at home for your own use.
Deer worm is not gonna spread to a human,
so it's very safe to go ahead and slaughter for that,
and so that would be some of my advice.
And then, as I said, as far as your breeding stock
that is producing those organic lambs and kids,
if they're not in the last third of gestation,
you can use it on them
without jeopardizing their future ability
to raise organic lambs and kids.
But again, talk to your certifying organization
and your inspector when you have an animal go down
with deer worm to figure out what's gonna be allowable.
And this was an infected deer or goat at my farm,
and you can see that she's improved in five days.
She hasn't improved completely,
and she never improved completely,
but she was pregnant at this time.
She was in early gestation.
She had just gotten bred, and she did produce,
I think, three more litters,
and then we culled her after the third litter.
For each litter, she would go down for a day or two
before kidding, and then by the last one,
she was going down about a week earlier,
and we went, "It's time.
That nerve damage is building up.
It's time for us to cull her."
We're now gonna go into part two.
And are there any questions on this first part
for Betsy or for me first?
And one thing, actually, Betsy,
if we could share a screen for a minute,
I can show the NOFA New York list of organic
or of allowable things for parasites, okay?
So Betsy, should I hit share screen now?
- Yeah, if you have it up.
- [Tatiana] Okay.
- You have it up so you can share it.
- [Tatiana] Okay. Can people see this?
- I can see it. I can see it. - I can see it.
- Can't see the whole thing, but I can see some.
- [Tatiana] We will send this out.
If Kelsey's okay with this, we will send this out to people.
So I would tend to avoid for trying anything with,
for deer worm, I would tend to avoid black walnut hulls
in that situation, and again, as I said,
copper oxide wire particles
are not gonna work in that situation,
but you can be looking at some of these other possibilities.
You could try your Vermatox or possibly your Nematox.
But if you don't see much improvement,
then I think the main thing would be to go
with your chemical ones, unfortunately.
So I think prevention is a huge part of it,
and a lot of prevention,
if you have guardian dogs on your farm,
having a way where your guardian dogs
can patrol a lot of your pastures,
as well as the pasture they're currently in
with the animals and then, over the winter,
really figuring out where your deer are bedding,
and if your family dog and you can go out to those areas
and really discourage 'em from bedding in any areas
that are areas that you're pastoring in,
that can be helpful.
We had farmers who went from being part time on the farm
to being full time on the farm and said that,
"Hey, when we became full time,
we were active enough here
that the deer just really cleared out of the pastures."
Steve Gabriel did a study.
I think their Wellspring Farm did a study,
and I can send you all the link for it,
where they were looking at using their ducks
in their grazing paddocks that their sheep were in.
And Betsy, I'll stop sharing this screen
and see if I can bring up their screen for a minute.
Okay, stop share. - There you go.
- And then share screen.
Oh, I don't see it.
- Which one are you wanting to share? I might have it up.
- So they have a PDF of their report of what their-
- Yeah.
- Their duck studies with their mushrooms
and then also with their deer worm.
- I can find it if you give me a minute.
'Cause I had it up earlier. - Oh, wait, here it is.
I have it.
So let me go back and see if I can share screen
and get this one up.
Yeah, here. Okay.
And so the main thing that they were finding,
they had a lot of trouble monitoring the slug
and snail population in their paddocks.
So that made the study really challenging for them,
and then it did appear that while the ducks
would bring the slug population down,
whenever the ducks got put into a paddock,
that the population would recover really quickly.
So these arrows are when the ducks went
into specific paddocks, and then you can see,
like with this blue line, how the slugs quickly recovered,
and with this yellow,
I think it really only stayed down for four days.
They were like that if it was a lot
of trouble moving the ducks through there,
and there was a whole bunch of trouble and time spent trying
to monitor how many slugs were out there.
So they weren't saying that, "Oh, forget about using ducks
or forget about using Guinea hens."
But they were just saying that
for the bang you got for your buck,
unless you were already gonna be pastoring your ducks,
it probably wasn't worth it to buy ducks
and bring ducks in specifically for that purpose.
And so unfortunately, that was their results
was that the slugs did come down.
I know that our farm,
the main thing that has helped is just making it
where the deer are not comfortable being in those pastures.
We used to do great with just our farm dogs patrolling
and us taking walks out there in the wintertime,
just keeping the deer off our land
and on our neighbor's land,
and then it became a problem
when our neighbors started raising beef cattle on the land.
Then the deer pressure was such
that the deer started coming back over to our place.
Okay, so I'm gonna stop share.
But any prevention type stuff you can do using your dogs,
the best thing is to try
and get that prevention going if possible.
Just get it so your white-tailed deer are not happy there
and also knowing that the first time you come
into a new brush area,
that's when your problem's gonna be the worst,
when you're coming into a new area bordering the woods
or partially in the woods or into a pass
or when you're renovating an area with your goats,
that's gonna be the worst year usually,
that first year.
Okay. - I tried it with geese,
but the geese were hard to keep where I wanted 'em
to be eating the slugs, but the idea was great,
but the practicality of it was really difficult.
- Yeah, and as I said, we will make the link to Steven.
Is it Elizabeth?
Gabriel's study that they did with Sarah on that.
Okay, so knowing your weapons, and so-
- Tatiana, sorry, do you mind if I just hop in?
There's a bunch of questions
about whether VOF - Sure.
- has a similar list that's great like that NOFA,
NOFA New York list.
And I did I posted a link to VOF's page.
It looks like they don't keep a list on the website
because it's a live document and they update it frequently,
and so they're saying on that website, the best thing to do,
if you want a list of those approved materials,
that you should reach out to the VOF office
for their most up to date list,
and they'll send it out to you.
Yeah, I'll share these resources that you're touching on
after the webinar by you. - And actually,
when I talked to Kyla today,
they were saying that their agreement with NOFA New York
is they actually use the NOFA New York list.
- Oh, great.
- So you have that NOFA New York list and can send it on.
And then what both NOFA New York
and what VOF said was to please,
when you go to treat a deer worm animal or another animal,
let your inspector know right away
because things could've changed from day to day.
And I noticed on the VOF website
and on the NOFA New York website,
if you go to the original fact sheets under resources
for starting a dairy or starting a sheep or goat dairy
or a sheep or goat meat operation,
it still lists ivermectin as being allowable,
and it doesn't list Cydectin in at all.
So by allowable, meaning in an emergency situation,
that you can use it on a breeder animal or a dairy animal,
but you still could not use it on a meat animal
and have that meat animal harvested as organic.
So because it does change all the time,
it's really important to check
with your inspector on what's allowable.
- Great. Thank you. - Okay.
So any more questions along that line?
And we will make those sheets available.
And so proper use of traditional weapons,
today, we're gonna go over chemical dewormers a little bit.
And I think Christine is saying
that if you are a VOF-certified organic farm,
that you can go to the portal
and find their list there as well.
And so we're gonna spend a lot of time next week
on pasture management, on nutrition genetic selection
and the immune system, and on selective deworming,
and then we'll also go into part three,
which is the newer things that have been developed,
are things that are in the pipeline that may be beneficial.
Okay, so today, again,
we'll just focus on the proper use
of your traditional weapons, okay?
And so chemical dewormers,
a valuable limited resource that must be managed properly,
and they may not be available to you,
particularly if you're certified organic, okay?
Next, there's three drug families. Go ahead and hit enter.
Okay, you have your benzimidazoles.
They're usually known as your white paste dewormers,
and most of these are pretty safe to use
because they have been around a long time.
The original one was thiabendazole.
There is a lot of resistance showing up to them,
and then we have our nicotinics,
which would be things
like your levamisole and your morantel,
and we'll talk more about those.
In the old days,
people used to use chewing tobacco as a dewormer.
It can be pretty toxic at times,
and it's hard to know what dose is right,
but that's been used, and then the third family available
to us in the United States,
the third chemical family available is your macrolides,
which include your ivermectin
and your Cydectin and various other drugs,
and so we'll talk about those in individual detail next.
All right, so your white trenches, go ahead. Yeah.
They hit most of your strongyle worms,
most of those gastrointestinal worms that reside either
in the abomasum or in the intestines.
They have a wide margin of safety.
They're fairly effective against tapeworm.
Now, not all of these will actually kill the tapeworm head.
But as we said, tapeworm, usually with tapeworm,
you're just trying to knock it back a little bit.
And it's like coccidia in that animals
will normally develop a resistance to it.
You're only gonna see it as a problem really that first year
of life and in animals
that are really compromised nutritionally.
People will say, "Oh, my goat died from tapeworms,"
and it can.
We did mention that overeating issue,
disease issue that can happen, but for the most part,
what's happening is the same time the animal
gets heavily infected with tapeworms,
it gets infected with your strongyle worms
at the same time.
So it really could've been the barber pole worm
or brown stomach worm or something else
that was the actual kill,
but what you saw were the tapeworms.
Okay, the Valbazen, the neat thing about it
is it is the only one of these that's fairly effective
against adult liver flute, less so on your immature fluke,
but the big problem with it is it
should not be administered to pregnant animals.
Okay, next.
If you go back there a second, I'm sorry.
I guess that's about it.
Your oxfendazole, which is your Synantic,
isn't licensed for sheep and goats, I don't think.
And if you're already - I don't think so either.
- [Tatiana] to the other, it won't be that helpful usually.
Okay, next slide. Okay, so your nicotinics.
A lot of these are sold as oral dewormers,
your Goat Pellet and stuff.
And several of these are only effective
against adult worms because we'll go
into a life cycle later on with your strongyle worms,
and some of these worms are immature stages
aren't capable of hibernating in the animal,
hibernating in your sheep or goat.
When they hibernate, they're much harder to kill
because their metabolism slows down.
So of your nicotinics, it's really only your levamisole
that's effective against these hibernating larvae.
The levamisole,
of all these commercially available dewormers,
probably has the narrowest margin of safety,
especially the injectable products.
So you do wanna be pretty careful
of the weight of your animals
and following that label pretty cleanly.
And it's marketed as Prohibit nowadays
as well as levamisole.
Next slide.
And okay, and then you have your macrolides,
and this was the last class
that was made available in the United States,
and that was years and years ago that it was made available.
Again, broad spectrum, wide margin of safety.
It's effective against sucking,
lice as well, so that's a plus on it.
Of these, Cydectin was the newest drug of that group,
and again, that was years and years ago,
and it was really good at killing eggs,
and so it was gonna be the miracle dewormer.
And unfortunately, animals built up resistance
to this class of dewormers pretty quickly,
in part because of just the genes
that are involved for this, and if people want,
at some point, we can talk about that more.
It is a co-dominance thing,
and so happens if the mother worm has inherited the gene
for resistance and the father worm hasn't
and they crossbreed,
there's a good chance of their offspring
inheriting the dominant gene from one parent
and the non-dominant gene from the other parent.
And because this is a co-dominant situation,
even if the baby worm hasn't gotten both
of the dominant genes,
it still has some resistance to the dewormer.
And unfortunately,
ivermectin was set up to be used as a pour-on initially
or as an injectable, which meant that it was staying
in the body in a low dose for a long time.
And so, as the animal would get infected
with worms every day as they're out on pasture,
the genetic pool of worms was selected
for this co-dominance, as well as for this dominance.
If the animal carried even one gene for dominance,
that worm was better able to survive
than those worms that carried than those worms
that had inherited neither of the dominant genes
from either of their parents,
and so it built up in the population very quickly,
this ability to carry these dominant genes.
And so that's why ivermectin worked for so little time,
as opposed to your levamisole,
which its most common way that barber pole worm
stays resistant to it is through a double recessive.
So you have to build up a whole bunch
of the recessives in the population.
Okay, so I'll stop talking about that.
- Well, I wanted to mention that when you go
to the feed store to buy a dewormer,
about the only thing you can often get is ivermectin,
and it may not be effective at all in your flock or herd.
So you need to look for a source
of some different dewormers, like in mail order
or the veterinarian or something
so that you can have some choices.
- [Tatiana] Right. Okay, next slide.
Okay, right.
So often you may be ordering these through the mail
through Jeffers or Valley Vet,
or there's a whole bunch of different companies
or through your veterinarian.
We're almost always using these with extra label drug use,
which means that we're using 'em differently
than the FDA label on that dewormer bottle
or that dewormer envelope says how to use it.
Only fenbendazole, when it's marketed as Safeguard,
morantel, and albendazole are FDA approved for goats,
and albendazole is actually only approved
for goats for liver fluke, okay?
And when it comes to sheep,
it's not really much better.
Only albendazole, your Ivomec drench,
your Cydectin drench, and your levamisole
are FDA approved for sheep.
And Safeguard is approved for mountain sheep,
but it's actually not approved for regular sheep,
but veterinarians often do use it,
but you have to remember that the livers
are very likely to be condemned
and that the withdrawal period is actually really long
if you've used Safeguard because it seems
to linger in the liver of sheep.
- At least you can use the Valbazen,
which is the same family.
- [Tatiana] Right, right.
And you go, "Well, why isn't the Valbazen lingering
in the livers?"
It'd be nice if they did a few more studies
and really verified a lot of this.
And the use of a product that it's different from its label,
as I said earlier, is what we call extra label drug use,
and it requires a veterinary prescription.
And as part of that veterinary prescription,
you have to have a valid veterinarian
and patient client relationship.
And so that's where getting to know a veterinarian
and having 'em come out to your farm once a year
for at least a well animal check where they just go
through and see your farm.
I know in New York,
we have the New York State Sheep
and Goat Health Assurance Program,
and so the state will actually pay for the state vet
and your vet to come out and meet with you
at your farm for about an hour.
I think the first visit,
they're allowed to meet with you for two hours,
and then after that,
they're really only paying for an hour of your vet's time.
But most of that actually ends up being in your house,
asking you what your goals are,
are you trying to eradicate Johne's,
are parasites your big issue,
and coming up with a plan of attack
for how you're gonna deal with issues.
But they do go through your herd as part of that,
but this would not help you out in emergencies,
but at least it makes you have one visit from your vet
that's almost a well animal visit
where they're just coming and seeing how things are.
And then when you use these things off label,
your veterinarian will normally check with FARAD,
the Food Animal Residual Avoidance Database,
to see what the recommended withdrawals are.
And unfortunately,
depending on who answers their query with FARAD,
they can get different responses,
which can be really frustrating.
And there used to be a frequently asked question section
of FARAD that did go through some
of the withdrawals and stuff,
but I noticed that they've changed that section now,
and the frequently asked questions are different,
and they're no longer stating those questions
that answered what a veterinarian had said already,
what FARAD had said already as far as
how long before you use the milk
from an animal that got Safeguard and stuff.
So it's a bit frustrating that you
can't always get the same response depending
on who you talk to there.
Next slide.
So, as we said, there's few that are now available
for sheep and goats, and many of those,
because they've been used year after year
and sometimes just pretty much overused
or are used in such a way that, unfortunately,
we develop more resistance in our animals to 'em.
They often don't work as well as the label
would indicate they're gonna work.
And so for goats, we usually say you should be using one
and a half to two times the sheer cattle dose
per live weight pound of that animal.
And this is because goats have a faster rate of passage
of things they digest through their system,
and they have larger livers
that break down chemicals quicker than those
of sheep or cattle for their size.
And pour-on works poorly in goats and sheep,
and so we usually aren't recommending the use
of a dewormer as a pour-on.
We usually say that because the same thing,
that they shouldn't be injected,
that instead, giving 'em orally is the best thing to do.
And you wanna give 'em behind the tongue
so that the dewormer goes to the rumen.
If it goes towards the front of the tongue,
the animal has the opportunity to go,
"This tastes awful," and have a gag response,
and the gag response, just like in a baby animal,
just how in a baby animal,
liquids are shunted to the true stomach,
a gag effect will cause that dewormer
to be shunted to the true stomach.
- Sorry. - Okay.
Yeah, if you can go back.
And if it goes to the true stomach,
it breaks down really quickly
in the acidity of the true stomach,
so you're usually wanting it to go to the rumen first
so it lingers in the animal longer.
And then, of course, absorb the withdrawal period.
You'll be getting links to the American Consortiums
for Small Ruminant Parasite Control website,
and they just updated in, I think, October.
They updated their dewormer list for goats
and for sheep and for camelids,
and they talk to FARAD when they update that list.
They talk to FARAD and get recommendations from FARAD
of the withdrawals at that time
for the kind of dosages they're recommending,
which are off-label dosages.
So we'll make sure that you get a link to that.
And then dewormers in your feed or water,
the big problem with those,
and it's the same with your coccidiostats in the water,
is it's hard to make sure
that each animal got the right dosage.
So that's why we often like to give 'em directly,
orally directly into the mouth of the animal.
Next slide.
Okay, if you're starting to do see resistance then,
especially with your white paste dewormers,
it seems efficient, seems to help the efficiency
of that dewormer if you can hold the animal off
of feed 16 hours before you give the dewormer
and then for 12 hours afterwards.
And so obviously, you wouldn't do this kind of fasting
in late pregnancy because you might cause the animal
to go into ketosis, okay?
And then also deworming twice,
so using that full dosage twice 12 hours apart seems
to help the white drench family to stay more effective.
And then deworming on the same day with two dewormers
from two separate families can be helpful,
but you would only use that
when you're selectively deworming.
If you did that with your whole herd,
you would just be building
up dewormer resistance even faster.
Next slide.
Okay, and then someone was asking, I think, Christine,
you were asking about if you're bringing
in animals out of state, and actually, Christine,
I would say if you're not an organic farm
and you're bringing in animals from a different farm,
often doing that three, what we often recommend
is to give all three dewormer families to that animal,
and then compost that manure.
Don't spread that manure out in your pastures
because the only worms that
are gonna survive those three families
are super worms that have built up resistance to all three,
where the gene pool has built up resistance
to all three dewormers,
and so you wouldn't want that individual worm
to be putting out a whole bunch of eggs on there.
And then they're saying,
"Hey, they were given dewormer prior to coming to our farm."
It all depends on how effective the dewormer was.
Often, before you put 'em out on your pastures,
it would be a good idea to do a fecal sample
and to see how many worm eggs there are
in that fecal sample or if it's pretty clean.
If you bring the animals in at the beginning of winter
and they're with your herd all winter
before they go out to pasture,
their worms will have intermingled with your worms,
and there's less chance
of their worms having a big effect on your pasture.
If you're buying 'em and you're putting 'em out
in your pastures or you're buying 'em this time of year
and putting 'em out in your pastures,
they can have a pretty big effect
on changing that worm population in your herd.
So that's where it is good to do a fecal sample and check,
and often, that combination is gonna get more worms
than using one family alone.
- Thanks, Tatiana. I just wanna do a time check.
I've had a couple people say they have
to hop off and do tours. - And I'm all done.
We're not gonna go through any more of this.
- Okay.
- [Tatiana] And so I can continue answering some questions.
So Elsa's asking, "When you do a fecal sample,
do you combine samples from a lot
of animals into one sample?"
No, you only do that if you're sending it off
to get a drench right test done on it,
which is where a lab is gonna look at all of those,
and they're gonna put 'em in little, not Petri dishes,
but little pools where they directly put the dewormer
in there with the hatching larvae
and see which dewormers have an effect
on those hatching larvae and which don't.
Instead, you wanna sample multiple goats separately,
and we usually say if you're wanting a good idea
of your herd, pick a couple of goats
or sheep that look pretty poor in your herd
and a couple that look pretty good
and look at their fecal samples,
and that will hopefully give you an idea
of the range of what's happening in your herd
because when you pull those samples,
that animal that had 6,000 worms,
getting it combined with an animal that has zero or five
doesn't give you a clear idea of what the problem is.
You may have it coming out that,
"Oh, on average, we have 900 worm eggs."
That doesn't seem too bad when, really,
there were a couple of really critically ill,
critically infected animals there.
So it's usually best to pull them individually.
Any more questions?
- I see somebody asked if nicotinics kill bees in the feces.
Hopefully the bees wouldn't be in the feces.
- [Tatiana] Yeah,
I do not believe that it causes any issues.
We've had trouble with ivermectin in dung beetles,
and it seems to be in particular cases.
And there are more studies going on right now,
I know, through Cornell Cooperative Extension
with dung beetles and what affects them and stuff,
but I know that we do use ivermectin or, excuse me,
the dewormer you had mentioned was which one?
- Nicotinics, so probably Prohibit.
- [Tatiana] Right, so the levamisole family,
and we do use that one sometimes
with the solar array sheep at Cornell,
and we do pollinator testing out on the solar arrays.
And I know the bee populations
have stayed pretty healthy out there.
So I think it's pretty localized in that feces,
so I don't think it would be an issue for bees.
- They also ask, "What is best for lambs?"
Which answer is it depends. (laughs)
- [Tatiana] It really depends.
I think when we do part two,
we'll be doing a little bit about dewormer resistance,
and from farm to farm based on your history
of your farm and your flock,
it can really vary what your farm is resistant to.
So you're looking for something that is-
- It's gotta work on your farm.
- [Tatiana] That works for you, okay? Basically.
And one simple way to do that is if you do learn
how to do fecal sampling and have a microscope you
can borrow or invest in a microscope
or have a county extension office
that has microscopes available,
if you have got a discussion group or something,
then doing before and after deworming sampling,
right before you deworm, you take a fecal sample,
and then 10, 14 days later, you take another fecal sample
and see how effective that dewormer was,
that can work well for you.
And that also works
for if you're testing out herbal dewormers and stuff.
That can be a quick way to see,
"Hey, is this working as an acute dewormer in my herd?"
- And we found doing our feeding study,
we thought we were using an effective dewormer,
but then when we sampled them again two weeks later
to see if it worked, there wasn't any change at all,
so you can't assume that everything's working.
There's another question here, Tat, about,
"Are there any breeds that are prone
or proven to be more-"
- [Tatiana] We'll be talking about that during part two,
as far as some of the breed,
and I'll probably ask you guys
to talk a little bit about your breeds and stuff.
It also depends.
You can abuse a breed and make that breed less resistant
to parasites yourself.
But yeah, it's genetically as inheritable as milk yield.
So there's definitely a strong genetic component to it.
- I just realized I can stop sharing while we do this.
- Yeah. Right. - There we go.
- [Tatiana] And you guys
have been really, really patient. (laughs)
Any more questions for Betsy or myself?
I know we went through those egg charts pretty fast.
We cannot make those egg charts available online very well.
You do have 'em in your PowerPoint,
in the PowerPoint slides.
You 'em available to you there.
For people who come to the in person,
we will have those egg charts available there, okay?
But we're, we're not allowed to put 'em online.
- So there's a question about,
"Can you breed for parasite resistance?"
And I think we cover that next week.
- [Tatiana] Yeah.
You can select for resistance, yes.
- [Tatiana] Yeah.
Okay. - All right.
Thank you, Betsy, and thank you, Tatiana,
and I will follow up with all these links
that we've mentioned.
I'll email everyone who's registered and attending.
I'll send out an email with handouts
and some more links and information,
as well as a link to the recording
'cause some people had to leave early or join late,
and there will be a recording of part two as well.
So the next webinar will be part two next Monday
at the same time, seven to 8:30.
Yeah. Anything else, Betsy and Tatiana?
- That's good. - No,
I'm looking forward to coming to Whiting, Vermont.
- (laughs) Well, we did split this up this week this way
because it's a lot to absorb all at once.
So we're hoping by doing it this way
and then covering the other part next week,
it'll give you a chance to think about it a little bit
and remember it a little easier.
- And I got a little wordy because I was aware
that Betsy was going through her time
in less time than she thought it was gonna take.
That's why I said, "Oh,
can I talk about a case study about coccidia?"
'Cause I was going, "Wait!
She's getting to me way too soon."
And then I blabbed my mouth off about deer worm,
and anyone who knows me knows
that I tend to talk way too much.
So I'm sorry.
- I think the case studies are great.
- And it's very interactive, I think they illustrate-
- so I feel bad about the fact
that we're not able to interact with you guys
as much as if we were all in per person, but this was good.
So. - This is great. Yeah.
And hopefully a lot of people are signed up
for the in person on farm sessions,
so we'll have some interaction then.
- And you said there's a little more room
in the morning session if people might wanna-
- There is still room in the morning session
if anyone here still wants to join for the morning session,
nine to 12 on May 23rd.
The afternoon session is full, but we have about 10,
11 spots left in the morning session.
- All right. - All right.
- Everybody have a great night and enjoy the nice weather.
- Thanks. You, too.
- See you are all. - All right, bye bye.