For the last few years, I've been not only keeping records of deworming the goat herd but compiling some averages - previous years can be found on the Facebook farm page under the tag #heftygoathollerfarmrecords.
2020 was interesting, in terms of parasites. Not what I would consider a bad year, just different. I had 10 does kid and dewormed 9 of those. Kidding is my "free pass" which means most does will get dewormed at kidding time. I do this because of the periparturient egg rise - you can read more about that here - https://www.wormx.info/pper - but it basically means does experience a parasite bloom around kidding. Because I do not want to miss this "bloom" and the stress/anemia it could cause my does, I go ahead and deworm shortly post-kidding. 7 does were given copper oxide wire particle boluses, as well. No does were dewormed twice in 2020.
Out of the 4 bucks I owned most of the year - I sold 1 in January and bought another in June - only 1 needed dewormed and only needed treated once. This was the newest buck and the youngest when he began rut, so I am going to surmise all of that were important factors. He had an EPG (eggs per gram calculated with a McMaster slide) of 1700, FAMACHA score 3/2 (I do not have the card yet so all scores are estimates). I checked the other bucks' FAMACHA scores at this time, for comparison, and they had excellent scores of 1, 2, and 1.
One dry doe (yearling) was dewormed out of twelve.
For the majority of the year I had 21 kids - one was purchased later, in mid-August and is not included in the average - she was dewormed once for tapes. Out of these 21 I owned for six months or more of 2020, 6 were dewormed for strongyles. By far the most I've had to deworm, even before I kept records, at least that I remember. 2 of these were dewormed twice for a total of 8 times. The average number of times kids were dewormed for strongyles in 2020 was .38 times - not even one time! Out of only the kids that WERE treated, the average number of treatments per kid was 1.3 times. I did have to treat kids for tapes this year...well, at least I decided to. More on tapes on my blog post https://www.heftygoathollerfarm.com/post/tapeworms-in-goats. Out of the 21 kids, I treated 12 specifically for tapeworms. These were all kids that were recently weaned.
Out of the total number of adult animals I owned for the majority (six months or more) of the year - the herd average for number of treatments was .42! That's the lowest average I've had since I started doing this a few years ago. If I average EVERY (strongyle and tapeworm) treatment for all the animals that did receive one or the other or both treatments (kids and adults) I get 31 treatments/28 animals = 1.1 treatments per animal.
If I average every treatment for the entire herd, including animals I owned over 6 months out of the year that did NOT require treatment (and are refugia!), I get an average of only .69 times! This is slightly lower than in 2019.
Goats were dewormed for strongyles primarily after kidding - I had does kidding mostly in March and April. The June and July treatments were all kids, interestingly enough. Of the 3 September treatments, one was the young, new buck in rut and two were a young wether and buckling that were being sold - that is why I dewormed them.
In conclusion, I feel like overall, it was not a bad year! Tickled with the bucks, especially. Rut can be so hard on them, and they were rutting HARD this year. The pasture stayed fairly tall, and I was able to sort of rotate to keep it that way and still get to cut the top field for hay.
The tapeworms, while they aren't SO bad, bother me. I suspect it had something to do with the weaning pen accommodations - it was a smaller pen than I would have liked, and I definitely kept more doelings than I originally intended...I will have to see what happens next year with that...
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