Health in goats is a balance between the resistance of the animal to disease and the dose of disease to which the animal is challenged. Sanitation is the tool that is used to reduce the disease challenge to animals. Disease resistance is composed of environmental factors and immunologic factors. Goats that are well fed and housed will be more resistant to disease than goats that are poorly nourished and poorly housed. Goats that are immunized against a specific disease by vaccination will be more resistant to it than goats that have no immunity. Dollars spent on a healthy environment always return more money than dollars spent on immunization.

An animal that is immunized against a disease is resistant to that specific disease. Immunization can be done with the injection of commercially available vaccines (e.g., tetanus toxoid) or by the administration of immunoglobulins (e.g., colostrum or tetanus antitoxin) or by the natural exposure to the disease producing agent (coccidia or toxoplasmosis). All of these result in an animal that is partially or completely immune to the disease. Vaccination means to administer a modified live or killed microbiological agent with the goal of preventing an infectious disease. Vaccination is sometimes incorrectly used as in “I vaccinated my goat with BO-SE to prevent it from getting white muscle disease.”

Immunization programs take some of the risks out of raising livestock. Vaccinating goat kids against tetanus will save the life of a kid that otherwise would have died. Fortunately, tetanus is not a contagious disease which means that tetanus doesn’t spread from one goat to another. So the vaccine will only save the goat that received a vaccination. Rabies is an infectious and contagious disease. When a kid is vaccinated against rabies he is not only protected from the disease but the other goats are protected from getting rabies from the vaccinated goat. In the case of tetanus it is important that all animals be immunized against tetanus. In the second case it would probably be adequate if the dog was immunized against rabies and none of the goats were immunized.

If immunization is going to be relied on to protect our goats from disease, then it is important that immunization occur prior to the challenge of disease. If does get infected with Chlamydia and abort only when they are pregnant, then the doe needs to be immunized prior to breeding. See the Preventive Health module for details on immunization programs. Sit down with your veterinarian to make an immunization plan specific to your farm and your management.

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