Let me begin this article by stating that I am not a vet and do not claim to know nearly as much as anyone else out there, I just know what worked for us on our farm.

Now here is the story. We were out working our goats one day doing the normal trimming of hooves and worming, checking each goat to make sure that everything was ok, just like we had done numerous times. Everyone checked out ok and each goat got the same amount of worm medicine at the same rate based on weight. No abnormalities were noticed. We did this early in the morning as it was cooler so this would have been somewhere between 8:00 and 10:00 that we wormed all of our goats. No other medications were given.

At about 3:00 that afternoon we noticed that one of the goats that we had handled that morning was not acting exactly right. We began to keep a closer eye on the goat in question. Within about thirty minutes the goats condition had deteriorated to the point that it was walking around and around in circles, but still trying to keep up with the herd. We knew that at the rate it was going we did not have much time to diagnose and treat her or we were going to have a dead goat on our hands. After several calls we had it down to two possible problems, listeriosis or goat polio(Polioencephalomalacia). Since Listeriosis is normally detected in goats during cold weather months and we had just given worm medicine to the goat in question, we guessed that it must be goat polio. We did not have any Thiamine on hand so, we decided to give large doses of Vitamin B complex, before doing this make sure that you Vitamin B Complex has plenty of Vitamin B1 as Goat Polio is a Vitamin B1 or Thiamine deficiency. We continued to give shots (10cc) per day of the Vitamin B complex for approximately 2 weeks until the goats condition began to improve. The improvements we noted were gradual, no drastic improvements were seen or expected and luckily the goat lived. Today, the goat is still on our farm and we have had no additional problems from this goat, or any other goat on our farm.