Uterine Tears in Goats

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Description

In this episode, Deborah Niemann is joined by Dr. Daniela Luethy, Assistant Professor of Large Animal Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, to discuss the realities of uterine tears in goats, risk factors, and what goat owners need to know as kidding season approaches. Dr. Luethy shares the results of a new multicenter study on reproductive complications in goats and clarifies common misunderstandings about prevention, symptoms, and management of uterine tears.

If you raise goats, are anticipating kids, or want expert insight into kidding emergencies, this episode is a must-listen.

What You’ll Learn:

• Why uterine tears happen in goats and why they’re often misunderstood
• The challenges of researching goat reproductive disorders
• Study findings: prevalence, risk factors, and survival rates for uterine tears
• Why small breed goats are at greater risk—especially with on-farm intervention
• The warning signs of uterine tears and how they differ from vaginal tears
• When to call a vet and how to reduce the risks during kidding
• What goat owners can do to help prevent serious complications
• Why veterinary involvement can save lives
• What’s still unknown about rebreeding goats that survived a uterine tear
• Areas where more research is needed on goat reproductive health

Resources:

• Multicenter study of uterine tears and other reproductive complications in periparturient goats presented to veterinary teaching hospitals
• Pregnancy Toxemia in Goats (podcast)
• University of Pennsylvania School of Veterinary Medicine - Facebook
• University of Pennsylvania School of Veterinary Medicine - Instagram

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Transcript

Uterine Tears in Goats

Intro  0:03 
For the love of goats, we are talking about everything goats, whether you're a goat owner, a breeder or just a fan of these wonderful creatures, we've got you covered. And now here is Deborah Niemann.

Deborah Niemann  0:18 
Hello everyone, and welcome to today's episode, this is going to be a really interesting episode for a lot of you who are raising goats and going to be approaching kidding season in a few months. I decided to do this episode as soon as I saw this study that our guest today had co-authored with several other vet professors and researchers from multiple universities, because a couple years ago, I posted something on Facebook about uterine tears, and I was shocked that multiple people insisted that it was impossible for a goat to have a uterine tear following birth and following intervention in a birth.

Deborah Niemann  1:01 
And other than saying, “Well, I know it can happen, because it happened to a goat that I had,” there was not a lot more I could do. But I realized we needed more information on this, because there were also people on the other end who insisted that, like, “oh, goats tear all the time when they're giving birth.” It's not a big deal. So as soon as I saw this study, multicenter study of uterine tears and other reproductive complications in periparturient goats presented to veterinary teaching hospitals, which was published in the Journal of Veterinary Internal Medicine. I knew I had to have one of the authors on the show to talk about what they found in their study.

Deborah Niemann  1:39 
Today we are joined by Dr Daniela Luethy, who is an Assistant Professor of Large Animal Medicine and a Large Animal Internal Medicine Specialist at the University of Pennsylvania School of Veterinary Medicine. Welcome to the show today, Dr Luethy!

Dr Daniela Luethy  1:54 
Thank you so much for having me. I'm excited to be here and to chat about this.

Deborah Niemann  1:58 
Yeah, me too. So first of all, let's just start with the basics, like, why did you and your colleagues decide to do this study?

Dr Daniela Luethy  2:08 
I decided to do this study because largely driven by, like, my experiences with a couple different patients that I had, but in particular, one goat that I had that was in the hospital, and I'm not going to say her name for patient confidentiality reasons, but I remember her name, and I still think about her. And this was a goat that had pregnancy toxemia and was quite sick in the hospital for a while, and then eventually did kid and actually needed fairly minimal intervention, as far as her kidding, but then subsequently was ultimately diagnosed of a uterine tear, and ultimately didn't survive.

Dr Daniela Luethy  2:43 
And that really bothered me, because I didn't have a good explanation for why she developed a uterine tear. When I had seen uterine tears in goats before, they had usually been like dystocia or difficult kiddings, and it sort of made sense that occasionally that can cause trauma to the uterus in a tear. But in this one, it didn't make sense, and so I basically developed the study to try to look at like, what are the risk factors for uterine tears? And then when we were doing that, we decided to collect a bunch more data as well on these goats, because there's really not much out there, like you said in the literature.

Deborah Niemann  3:18 
Yeah, it's awesome that you involved a total of nine University Teaching Hospitals, which I think is great because so many goat studies that we see are a really small sample size, and this was ultimately like 198 goats from nine different centers. That is a huge job to do that. So I'm really impressed with your ambition. Why did you do that and how did you make that happen?

Dr Daniela Luethy  3:43 
Yeah, it was a big undertaking for sure, but I'm glad we did it this way. So I decided to do a multi center study, because I was trying to sort of improve the like generalizability of the results. So obviously, if you do a single institution like people within that practice probably practice medicine in similar ways, right? Versus, if you have multiple different places, people practice medicine in slightly different ways. And so I wanted to sort of account for different clinicians, different ways of practicing medicine, different like populations of goats as well. Because, you know, the like in the Midwest, there might be more meat breed goats versus my population.

Dr Daniela Luethy  4:24 
In my hospital is largely like pets and 4h goats and dairy goats, but not so much meat breeds. And so I wanted to sort of cast as wide of a net as possible, and then, exactly like you said, as well, to try to increase case numbers. Because if I had done a single hospital, I probably would have gotten 20 to 30 cases in a year, versus this way, we got almost 200 in a year. And so I think trying to just increase the case numbers was really important. But I do think one thing that's probably important to mention is that these were goats presented to university teaching hospitals, which usually are referral hospitals. So I think this is sort of a skewed population, and doesn't necessarily represent all goats out there that are, you know, pregnant and kidding in the world,

Deborah Niemann  5:10 
Right. So before you did the study, what would you say that you knew about uterine tears in goats?

Dr Daniela Luethy  5:16 
That's a good question. I mean, I guess what I would say I knew from clinical experience was that they definitely happen. It seemed like we saw it more commonly in dystocia, so like, difficult kiddings, and oftentimes with, like, fairly aggressive manipulation, vaginal palpation, trying to correct the dystocia. But I think the other question is like, what did we know in the literature, like in the veterinary literature or scientific literature about uterine tears. And the answer is, there was, like, almost nothing published.

Dr Daniela Luethy  5:39 
So when I had that case that I was trying to understand, I definitely, you know, looked back in the literature and tried to figure out, you know, is there anything that we knew? And there's almost nothing. There's one paper from like, 20 years ago that looked at goats and sheep that had C sections, and in that paper, six of the animals had uterine tears. That's like a pretty small number, and it was just sort of like an afterthought in that paper, they don't really talk about it any more than that. So essentially, there was almost nothing available in the literature.

Deborah Niemann  6:16 
Wow, that's great. So I'm even happier to know that you did this study now knowing that you're pretty much starting at ground zero. So what was your study design like?

Dr Daniela Luethy  6:25 
So I think we already talked about it was a multi center study. So what we did is we developed like a questionnaire that was distributed to these different hospitals, and then the admitting veterinarian for the case would fill this out and then send that form back to me, and then ultimately, the first offer on this paper was that Cole Roman was a vet student at the time, and she was in our summer research program that we had there, and so she collated all the data, and then did all of the analysis as part of that program.

Dr Daniela Luethy  6:45 
So we recorded a bunch of information about like, the age and the breed of the goat. I collected data on the breed of the buck, if we knew the breed of the buck as well, trying to look at like mismatch and that sort of thing. We collected like some historical factors, like, was there dystocia again? Was there vaginal palpation on the farm by someone before it was seen by a veterinarian, and then a bunch of other information about complications, number of kids, etc, and an outcome ultimately.

Deborah Niemann  7:28 
Did you have any challenges in terms of collecting the data from the various universities and standardizing it?

Dr Daniela Luethy  7:34 
Yeah, I mean, definitely. I think any multi center study comes with some like limitations, as far as like, more probably standardization of like treatments between places, and so again, that can potentially impact your results. And then certainly, I would say that, like, some forms were more completely filled out than other questionnaires, so certainly we had some missing data for some animals. And then, I guess, like, I mean, it's not necessarily a challenge, but it's one thing that we sort of thought about, is, in any veterinary study looking at prognosis, obviously there's an impact of finances, because that's certainly right.

Dr Daniela Luethy  8:13 
If the cost of treatment for fixing some problem is, you know, beyond what a client can afford, then obviously that's gonna, you know, we're gonna end up talking about euthanasia, which then will affect the prognosis and the survival, but it doesn't necessarily mean that that animal could not have survived if money was no object. And so I think that's, again, part of why I did the multi center study, because I think the clientele around certain universities might be different as far as, like, what they will spend or can spend, and also what the prices are for that hospital. So again, trying to look at that as well.

Deborah Niemann  8:47 
So what was the criteria used to diagnose a uterine tear?

Dr Daniela Luethy  8:52 
So we were pretty stringent about the diagnosis of uterine tear. So it had to be diagnosed based on vaginal palpation, in which case it usually was quite large; at surgery; or at post mortem examination, and if it was just a serosal tear, which is like a small tear on, like the outer surface of the uterus, which you would only see at surgery, but not like full thickness, we didn't count that as a uterine tear, because we were really trying to look at the ones that were full thickness and potentially catastrophic.

Deborah Niemann  9:25 
That makes sense. So in the end, how common were uterine tears?

Dr Daniela Luethy  9:30 
So overall, 32 out of the 198 goats had uterine tears. So that was like 18% so it wasn't the most common complication. The most common complication was retained fetal membranes, which about a quarter of the cases had that. But then about 32 of those goats had uterine tears.

Deborah Niemann  9:50 
And were there any particular risk factors that you found?

Dr Daniela Luethy  9:54 
Yeah, so that's ultimately like, what our objective was, that we were trying to answer. All of the goats. So all 32 goats with uterine tears, all of them were dystocias. So I think that was a risk factor for sure. And then when we did like our multivariate model, which is kind of like looking at all the different variables together and trying to see, you know, how they interplay and affect each other, the two final factors that were associated with uterine tears was small breed goat. And so we defined small breed as pygmy or Nigerian dwarf. And then large breeds were large breed, things like Boers or La Mancha, bigger breed goats.

Dr Daniela Luethy  10:33 
And then having a layperson, or like a non veterinarian, manipulate the dystocia on the farm before veterinary referral. So those were the two factors that were associated with development of uterine tears. And then when we looked at sort of the interplay between those in small breed goats that had manipulation on the farm before a veterinary referral, they were five times more likely to have uterine tears than large breed goats that did not have manipulation on the farm.

Deborah Niemann  11:06 
Wow, that totally makes sense, though, because I've raised Nigerians myself, and they are quite small, and so it totally makes sense that they would be much more likely to have uterine tears than a larger breed goat. And I admit sometimes I'm kind of jealous of people who have cows, because, like, you can put your whole arm in a cow and it's like, it's big as a house in there. So they probably don't really have any problems at all with that.

Dr Daniela Luethy  11:33 
Yeah, they have their own set of problems. But I think that's an important point is, like, I think part of why there's so limited literature on a lot of diseases and goats and sheep is that a lot of times we sort of extrapolate from cattle, but I think importantly, these are not small cattle right there. I mean, there's similarities, but there's also differences.

Deborah Niemann  11:54 
So could you talk more about how management practices played a role?

Dr Daniela Luethy  11:57 
Yeah, unfortunately, that information I don't really have beyond, like the assistance at birth, as far as like vaginal manipulation on the farm, so we didn't collect information on like management, like diet, like housing, any of that, unfortunately. And so that's something in a future paper that's probably worth looking at, especially because I think when we think about this overall, you know, I think there's different populations of goats, right? There's pet goats that are, like, truly pets, and maybe those owners have one goat that accidentally gets bred, right? And that's a very different population than, like, a production, you know, let's say dairy goat that's, like, fairly heavily managed. So unfortunately, we didn't look at that, but that's something we should look at in the future.

Deborah Niemann  12:43 
So this means that you didn't actually get any information about this in your study. But one of the things I'd like to talk about is the fact that on Facebook, there are a lot of people who encourage goat owners to try to manually dilate the cervix. A lot of times. It's like there is a handout that a Facebook group has that says, you know, put your hand in and if you feel a cheerio, that's the cervix, and you need to try to force it open. And that is what led to my Facebook rant a couple years ago, and saying that you could tear a goat's cervix and cause a whole uterine tear if you do that. But people think that's impossible. Could you talk about that?

Dr Daniela Luethy  13:27 
Yeah, I guess to me, and I think there are obvious limitations, because I recognize that there are places in this country that don't have easy access to large animal veterinarians who are comfortable working with goats and limitations as far as getting veterinary involvement. But I think that if there's ever a concern about a pregnant goat and kidding, I think early veterinarian intervention would be like number one on the list for me. I think certainly if someone is like a very well experienced goat owner like yourself, right? Who has kidded goat, I assume for many years, like you have some degree of experience, right? And knowledge that you've gained over those years. And I think that you know, maybe then you can do some investigation of what's going on vaginally.

Dr Daniela Luethy  14:16 
But I think, you know, having a handout and having someone on social media kind of give you guidance makes me very nervous about what could potentially happen in that goat, sort of adversely. And so I guess I would really caution people to not bite off more than they can chew without appropriate training or knowledge or education about that. And I guess to me, like, based on the story you just said, like to me, if the cervix is closed, sometimes there's a reason the cervix is closed, and it's not necessarily like, goat might not be in labor yet, right? And so dilating the cervix, in that case, could be very detrimental to the goat and the kids.

Deborah Niemann  14:55 
Yeah, because I've heard stories like that where the goat was not in labor and you know, I've heard a number of stories. Thankfully, sometimes the owner realizes like, Hmm, maybe my goats is actually not in labor. And then the goat gives birth just fine. You know, a few days later, like, they go out there and they feel like, Oh, look at that there's kids. She went into labor and had her babies all by herself with no help. But they just, they thought the goat was in labor before she really was.

Deborah Niemann  15:19 
But I think a lot of times on social media, well, and there are people who think that like, your goat is gonna drop dead like any second. Because I've heard people say like, “Oh, my goat never would have survived a trip to the vet.” And it's like, Well, if your goat had pregnancy toxemia, it could drop dead at any moment. If it has pregnancy toxemia, but it needs to be treated for pregnancy toxemia, so getting veterinary assistance at that point could still be your best bet, because that's a hard thing to do at home.

Dr Daniela Luethy  15:49 
Yeah, and I – not in this paper, but we did a follow up paper with the same set of goats on same set of data, looking at survival of the goats overall. And again, these are goats presented to referral hospitals, so they're the most severe of the severe. But one of the things that was most heavily correlated with survival was like the longer duration before veterinary intervention. So I think if it's an option to have a veterinarian involved sooner, that's probably the best way to go. But again, I recognize that there's limitations with access to large animal veterinarians.

Deborah Niemann  16:27 
Yeah, I have always been in an area other than the first two years. The first two years, I had a local vet, but then he sold his practice to somebody that just wanted to do dogs and cats, and so since then, I have to drive two hours to the Veterinary Teaching Hospital. And even with that two hour drive, I have had very positive outcomes, you know, even like the goat I had that had a uterine tear, which I have talked about in a previous episode, she was carrying quintuplets, and I was able to get the first kid out on the farm, because there was two kids try to come out at once constantly.

Deborah Niemann  17:02 
So I was able to get the first one out on the farm, and then I tried for quite some time to get the second one out, and I never could. And I was like, that's it. We gotta go. And so it was probably three hours between kid number one and Kid number 2, 3, 4, 5, and all five of them were born kicking and screaming and healthy. And, you know. So I think a lot of people get themselves worked up about their proximity to a vet when it's not as urgent as they think it is, you know, like you just need to find a vet, even if you have to drive a couple hours, there are times that you're really gonna need a vet, you know. So it's better to find it sooner rather than later.

Deborah Niemann  17:43 
Like the person who called me, she had a 10 month old, 27 pound Nigerian trying to give birth, and after pulling for two hours, she called me, and when she told me it was 10 months old, I said, “Oh my gosh, how much does she weigh?” And when she said 27 pounds, I was like, you've got to get her to a vet immediately. She can't give birth to a kid, and from the time that goat started pushing until the time the kid was born by C-section, was like eight hours, and it had a head that looked like a grapefruit, but it was alive, and it survived, you know. So I think we're all spoiled by having a dog and cat vet around the corner, and if we don't have a goat vet around the corner. We think we don't have a goat vet.

Dr Daniela Luethy  18:23 
Absolutely.

Deborah Niemann  18:24 
That's my rant for today.

Dr Daniela Luethy  18:26 
I love your rant.

Deborah Niemann  18:28 
So were there any findings in this study that surprised you?

Dr Daniela Luethy  18:32 
I think overall, I would say the findings were kind of what I expected, as far as small breed goats and having you know, manipulation on the farm. The one thing that I expected to find sort of an impact of was pregnancy toxemia, and we didn't. But I think that we potentially were just limited by the number of goats that we had in the study that had pregnancy toxemia, which I think was like 25 to 30 goats, if I remember correctly.

Dr Daniela Luethy  18:59 
And so I think we might just not have had enough, like, robust numbers to see an effect of pregnancy toxemia on that, but I do think pregnancy toxemia definitely makes the goat sicker overall. I think it affects, like, you know, causes uterine inertia, a lot of things that then can lead to issues as well. And then one result that I don't think was surprising, but I think was kind of reassuring to me as a someone who teaches vet students and residents at a teaching hospital is we did look at like once the goat was in the hospital.

Dr Daniela Luethy  19:29 
Did it matter who palpated the goat as far as like a resident? So that's like a veterinarian who is in training for a specialty certification or the faculty member, or didn't happen that often, but the student palpating and so did that have an impact on the incidence of uterine tears? It didn't seem to. So that, I guess, was a little bit reassuring to me, that, you know, residents are already veterinarians. They're just getting sort of specialty training, and that sort of veterinary experience level didn't have a huge impact in this study.

Deborah Niemann  20:01 
Okay, so I know with my goat that had the uterine tear, what happened was we were at the vet hospital at two o'clock in the morning, we came home, and it took us two hours to get home. By the time we got home, we put the goat in the barn and went to bed, and then at 7am when my husband went out to the barn, the goat was dead. And I called the vet and told her that Coco had died, and she was shocked. She's like, “I don't understand. Like, can you bring her back for a necropsy? She shouldn't have died.”

Deborah Niemann  20:29 
And so I took her back, and that was when they found the uterine tear, and she told me about it, and I said, but I don't understand. Like, I didn't see any blood, like there was no blood in the stall next to her, and that was when I learned that goats are horizontal creatures. They're not vertical, like we are, like we you know, gravity pushes blood down, but with goats, they bleed out into their abdomen. So I didn't see any blood. I had no clue that they were gonna say that it was a uterine tear that you know she bled to death. So what are the warning signs that your goat might have a uterine tear?

Dr Daniela Luethy  21:09 
I'm sorry that happened. So I think it can be variable, exactly like you said, like lack of blood doesn't rule out a uterine tear. I will say on the flip side, if there was a lot of blood, vaginally, you should worry about there being a tear. But if you don't see a lot of blood, it doesn't rule out a tear. And exactly like you said, so it can cause like rupture of the uterus, essentially to the point that they're bleeding into their abdomen, in which case what you're going to see probably externally, is they're going to start to become more lethargic, not as attentive to their kids. Eventually, probably recumbent, and then eventually, just like, really not looking very good.

Dr Daniela Luethy  21:49 
The other possibility is they don't bleed. But now you basically have, like, an opening. The uterus at that point, you know, has the cervix is open, so the uterus is like, essentially open to the world, right through the vagina, and again, if you palpated, which most people are palpating with bare hands or maybe gloves, so you're introducing a lot of bacteria. So the other possibility is they develop, like really significant peritonitis, which is like infection of the abdomen, and then they ultimately become septic. So similarly, they become lethargic. In that case, they might have a fever, if you take their temperature, but not always and again, eventually we'll just stop eating, not attentive to their kids sort of slowly decompensate. And so those would be the things that I would expect, like a owner to potentially see. As a veterinarian, there would be more things that we would see on our like physical exam and blood work as well.

Deborah Niemann  22:42 
Yeah, I had another goat who was not the biggest Nigerian, and for some reason, she decided to give birth to a kid that was over five pounds, and that goat had an internal vaginal tear, and the kid came out. She gave birth to it all by herself, with no help at all from me, but the kid came out covered in blood, and I was just staring like, uh, this looks bad. Like I've never seen a kid come out covered in blood before. I wish I would have got pictures before wiping him off. But even the pictures I got after I wiped him off, you still see an excessive amount of blood so some people, I realized in my Facebook post that some people don't know the difference between the vagina and the uterus.

Deborah Niemann  23:27 
And the uterus is like upstream of the vagina, so the baby comes out of the uterus, through the cervix, out the vagina, so the vagina is like the shoot where the baby comes out. So that's similar, but different in terms of blood loss. I think they're probably blood loss is blood loss. Either way, it's going to be bad. And that goat actually spent a week at the university vet hospital, and like you said, she just she was checked out, like she got out, walked away. She wanted nothing to do with her baby. She wanted nothing to do with me. Like this was an experienced milk goat. She'd been milking for years, up until a couple months earlier, and she was like, “Don't touch me. Stay away from me.” So that was what clued me in, that there was a problem. And took her to the university vet hospital.

Dr Daniela Luethy  24:12 
That I think that's a good description or distinction of like, uterus versus vagina, because I think you're right. Maybe people don't, not everyone understands that anatomy, but absolutely. And a vaginal tear can just be a vaginal tear, it can also extend all the way from the vagina through the cervix into the uterus.

Deborah Niemann  24:28 
Yeah, and they said that we shouldn't breed her again, because there would be so much scar tissue, it wouldn't stretch properly. And so she would really she'd either hemorrhage again or she would need a C section. So she wound up being our first three-year milker. So at what point should an owner call the vet if they suspect a complication?

Dr Daniela Luethy  24:49 
I would say immediately. I think if there's any concern at all, like that's what veterinarians are here for. So I think if there's any concern, getting veterinary involvement early. The earlier the better. And I think the earlier the better the outcomes potentially are.

Deborah Niemann  25:04 
Is there anything that people can do, like, obviously limiting vaginal palpation, unless it's absolutely necessary? I really feel like, if somebody's never done it before, it's best to, like, have a vet on the other end of the phone talking you through it. I know, like, that's what I did initially, and I think it was really helpful. But other than avoiding vaginal palpation, is there anything else that people can do to help prevent uterine tears?

Dr Daniela Luethy  25:29 
I think, exactly like you said, so having a veterinarian on the phone, or, if not access to a veterinarian, then, like, maybe someone with a lot of experience, you know, on the phone, so someone like you, who's done this for a while and has a lot of experience. And then I would say, if you are doing it, lots of lube and trying to, like, not be too aggressive with the palpation. I mean saying all of that, like you could do everything perfectly and be highly experienced and be a veterinarian, and sometimes there's still going to be a uterine tear and that, I think I still don't always have an answer for, and there's a lot going into it that's more than, I think what we identified in this study.

Deborah Niemann  26:13 
Yeah, exactly like I know, Coco was nine years old. It was her second set of quintuplets. So it was the second time her uterus had been stretched out to astronomical size, and these kids totaled 15 pounds. And yeah, that's a lot, nine years old. Second time carrying quintuplets. That was a lot of extenuating circumstances and stuff that I think made it so much more likely that she wound up with a tear. We all know now how Coco's story ended, but what are the survival rates that you found in your study for goats that have a uterine tear?

Dr Daniela Luethy  26:46 
Yes, that's a good question. So overall, of those 32 goats, there was a 40% survival rate, which you can look at that and say like, that's not great. But in that follow up study that I mentioned where we looked at survival of these goats, we delved into this a little bit more, because when I sort of looked at the data, I could see that there was some important distinctions there. And so when we looked at those, some of those 32 goats just died. And honestly, those were ones that were diagnosed at necropsy or post mortem exam. 16, so like half of the goats were euthanized. Like, pretty immediately, when the uterine tear was identified, without any treatment attempted.

Dr Daniela Luethy  27:30 
And so again, like, you don't know, right with those, like, they didn't survive, they were euthanized, but you don't know, like, if you had tried treating them, maybe they would have survived. And of the 11 goats that had surgery to correct their uterine tears, or the uterine tear was identified at surgery and then corrected, 10 of those survived. So although the overall survival was 40% when you actually sort of break it down, it seems like they either are euthanized early on, or if you can fix it surgically, they can actually do quite well. So 10 of 11 of those actually ended up surviving. And this is my soap box. A little bit is yes, uterine tears are bad, but you can potentially save these goats. It does require surgery and therefore some financial investment, but if the goat is financially or emotionally valuable, you can potentially save these goats, which is important for me, because I want to save these goats.

Deborah Niemann  28:29 
Yeah, exactly. So if a goat has a uterine tear, I don't want to assume that, you know, they told me that my goat with the vaginal tear should not be bred again. But is that also true of goats with uterine tear? Should they not be bred again? Or is that different?

Dr Daniela Luethy  28:46 
That's a really good question, and there's no data in the literature on it, so there is not really an answer to that right now, I would certainly say that a goat that has had a uterine tear, like it's going to depend on a lot of things, like how big the tear was, like how severe it was, where was the tear, and, like, how long was the tear there before it was identified? So, you know, as far as, like, degree of peritonitis, abdominal contamination, I think all those things kind of play a role. But I think depending on all those things, potentially, that would not be the best goat to rebreed. But there's, again, no data on this, and so that's something that like future studies. I think it would be worth looking at the impact of these complications on future fertility and reproductive outcomes. So that's to come, hopefully in the future.

Deborah Niemann  29:34 
Okay, how can owners try to balance helping during kidding and not causing any harm?

Dr Daniela Luethy  29:40 
I think the more owners can educate themselves about their goats, I think is really valuable. So reading books, going to, like a lot of universities will have, like, client education seminars for owners. I think all of that just to try to improve one's knowledge and experience everything around their animals, I think is really important. And then again, I think we kind of talked about this a little bit already, but like erring on the side of caution. So if anything, if you don't feel comfortable, don't keep pushing it as far as your evaluation and get help sooner rather than later.

Deborah Niemann  30:20 
This has been super fascinating, and I'm so glad you joined us today. Other areas that you feel like there more research is needed here, I think you've mentioned a couple already where you said there's no research on this, but any other areas where you think more research is needed or maybe something you're planning to do?

Dr Daniela Luethy  30:37 
Yeah, I mean, I think I already alluded to it, but we did the other study with the same set of goats looking at survival. And then we actually also did one looking at antibiotic use in these goats, which was more, not so much about the goats, a little bit more about, like antimicrobial stewardship, and kind of looking at that end of things, I think, looking at the effect of these complications on future breeding, reproductive outcomes, fertility, I think, is valuable. And then I think I kind of talked about this as well, but the study was again, like this was dystocia. Is largely this was sicker goats admitted to university referral hospitals. So it's not necessarily representative of all of the goats out there in the general population. And so I think doing a, like multi year study looking at goats at multiple farms, and kind of getting, like, boots on the ground information, I think would be really valuable to kind of get more idea about how often different complications are happening in, like the full goat population, instead of the population that's being referred to a referral hospital.

Deborah Niemann  31:43 
I'm excited about seeing what you do in the future. So are there any final takeaways, or key takeaways that owners should leave today with?

Dr Daniela Luethy  31:52 
Yeah, I think I've kind of harped on this, but I think early intervention is key, and if possible, like early veterinarian intervention, is really key. I think that is going to improve outcomes for the goats and the kids and hopefully reduce the risk of complications.

Deborah Niemann  32:09 
Yeah. It reminds me of what another vet said to me one time, and that is that most people intervene too early, but then they call the vet too late.

Dr Daniela Luethy  32:16 
I think that's very accurate.

Deborah Niemann  32:20 
Yeah. So thank you so much for joining us today. I know a lot of people are going to find this really valuable. So thank you for all your information.

Dr Daniela Luethy  32:29 
Of course, thank you so much for having me.

Deborah Niemann  32:31 
And that's it for today's show. If you haven't already done so, be sure to hit the subscribe button so that you don't miss any episodes. To see show notes you can always visit fortheloveofgoats.com and you can follow us on facebook@facebook.com/lovegoatspodcast, see you again next time. Bye for now you.