Antibiotics For Annie

With milkmaid Tricia being in the hospital, we figured it would be too much to try to keep milking Daisy, our Jersey cow, and Annie, our Nubian goat.  Daisy was making about a gallon of milk a day and very late in lactation, so we stopped milking her and her bag quickly went down.

Annie proved to be another story.  She was late in lactation as well.  I read that in order to dry off a goat, the best thing to do was to cut the feed ration down and then just quit cold turkey.  Well, a couple days afterward, Annie's teats seemed engorged. They weren't hard or hot, but she was having some difficulty walking and just seemed lethargic.  She laid around a lot. Could this be the beginning of mastitis? We're not sure.  To further complicate matters, she had a foot problem that just wouldn't clear up.

We use antibiotics very, very sparingly, but with everything going on, we figured we would just give Annie a dose of penicillin and hopefully it would clear up her problem.  For a 125 pound goat, we were to give her 2 cc's once a day for seven days.

So that is exactly what we are doing.  We draw a little more than 2 cc's out of the jar and then inject it back in the bottle to eliminate air bubbles.

This photo isn't good at all, but what you want to do is give the shot beneath the skin.  To do this you simply pull the skin up on the neck, making a "tent."

Then you inject the antibiotic directly into the "tent" you've made with her skin.  She didn't seem to be bothered by it all all.

We are on day 3 now, so we have 4 more days to go with shots.  Hopefully, Annie will get back to normal quickly with the antibiotics she's on.

Get Well, Annie.