I have a question about mastits, can any one give me any personal experiences or treatments of this problem. My doe is preganat, and I need some more information.

-- Ginger Poland (majic99@home.com), June 03, 2000

Answers

When a doe is 50 days from having kids, we dry her up, about 2 weeks after I milk her completely out and infuse her udder with a dry cow treatment. The anitbiotic sits in the udder until she freshens and I know that this has kept or incidents of mastits down. (It also has no effect on the colostrum or kid who drinks it) If a doe had abnormal milk during the year, we immediatly send in a milk sample, we have had no luck using udder infusions to treat a doe with mastitis while she is milking and would opt to use the anitbiotic (pen or naxcel) of choice once we find out what the bacteria is. While we are waiting for the results we use echniciea/goldenseal drops in her feed and we milk her 3 or 4 times a day. A well known dairy person wrote a nice article about staph aureous mastitis that most goats carry subclinical in thier udders, making their halves uneven and limiting their lactations without visible signs. Only on test was this detected. This is something I have "felt" for years, and will continue to use my dry cow regime, though we are switching to Persue this year, the drug that the article had such success with. Vicki

-- Vicki McGaugh (vickilonesomedoe@hotmail.com), June 03, 2000.

Well we had twins today, a healthy boy and girl. It seems as though my doe is doing fine. No problems with the milk. I amd bottle feeding though because the udders are so low that the little ones can't reach them easily. Thanks for your help.

-- Ginger (majic99@home.com), June 06, 2000.