Breeding: A Vet's View

In the second of our series on successful breeding, Jack Smellie talks to her vet Kate Stevens

- Jack Smellie

Our very first livestock birth back when we started out as smallholders was not a birth at all, or at least not a live one. It was two aborted kids on day 120 of the pregnancy, the tragic result of what our then vet suspected to be tick-borne fever in their mum a few days earlier. The goat in question, Whey, had had a soaring temperature and had been very poorly for at least 24 hours. We hadn’t even heard of tick-borne fever but when we spoke to the vet the next day, we remember saying with glee how Whey was so much better now, only to see her face fall. ‘The kids may have died inside her,’ she said. ‘Whey had a very high temperature and it may have been too much for her unborn kids to cope with.’

Whey was seemingly fully recovered, happily chewing the cud and looking very huge around her midriff. The vet was right though. So we then asked the inevitable question: ‘What could we have done?’ The response was: ‘Nothing really...’ Well, we could have treated both our goats with a spot-on or similar (we treat our dogs after all) - that may have helped.

Our initial call to the vet when Whey became ill had been made on the emergency line. Kate Stevens, our current vet, estimates that 80% of the emergency calls received at her practice will be to do with breeding or breeding related incidents (and we were given very similar figures by two other practices we spoke to). A certain percentage of these calls could perhaps be avoided if the livestock breeder had done something different or was experienced enough to deal with the situation themselves.