Medications for Goats: Understanding Antibiotics, Labels, and Safe Treatment Practices

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Description

In this episode, Deborah Niemann is joined by Dr. Pat Gorden of Iowa State University and Dr. Michelle Buckley of Cornell University to break down one of the most confusing topics for goat owners: medications and antibiotics.

You’ll gain a clearer understanding of how drug use works in goats, including what extra-label drug use actually means and when it is legal and appropriate. The discussion explains why toltrazuril (Baycox) is controversial and why the FDA has issued cease-and-desist letters related to its promotion, as well as how improper drug use can result in dangerous residues in milk and meat. 

You’ll also hear why antibiotics became prescription-only, the public health concerns driving those changes, and why veterinarians cannot recommend expired antibiotics. Throughout the conversation, Dr. Gorden and Dr. Buckley emphasize the critical role of management, nutrition, and husbandry in preventing diseases like coccidiosis and reducing the need for antibiotics, while also addressing why social media advice is often misleading and why building a relationship with a knowledgeable goat veterinarian is essential.

If you’ve ever struggled to get prescriptions, wondered why dosing information for goats is so hard to find, or felt overwhelmed by conflicting advice online, this episode will give you the clarity and science you’ve been missing.

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Transcript

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

Deborah Niemann  0:18 
Hello everyone, and welcome to today's episode. Today, we are diving into a topic that affects every single goat owner, whether you've got only a couple of pets or a dairy herd with hundreds of goats, and that is medications. If you've ever wondered why so few drugs are labeled specifically for goats, why almost every antibiotic now requires a prescription, or what it really means to use a medication off-label. This episode is for you.

Deborah Niemann  0:46 
I am joined today by two experts who work at the intersection of veterinary medicine, pharmacology, and food safety. This is Dr Pat Gorden and Dr Michelle Buckley, veterinarians and professors who specialize in pharmacology and antimicrobial stewardship. Doctor Gordon is at Iowa State, which is where he met Dr Buckley when she was working on her PhD, and she is now at Cornell University.

Deborah Niemann  1:13 
Together, we're going to talk about the realities behind livestock drug labeling, public health reasons for antibiotic prescription rules, how goat owners can be responsible and science-based stewards of the medications that their animals truly need. Whether you've struggled to get prescriptions, wondered why your vet sometimes has challenges trying to figure out how much of a drug to give your goat, or you're confused by all the conflicting information on social media, hopefully you will walk away from today's episode with a much clearer understanding of how drug use really works in goats and how to keep your animals healthier.

Deborah Niemann  1:50 
Welcome to the show today, Dr Buckley and Dr Gorden.

Dr. Pat Gorden  1:53 
Thank you.

Dr. Michelle Buckley  1:54 
Thanks for having us.

Deborah Niemann  1:55 
I am so excited to do this episode. I've been wanting to do something on antibiotics for ages, so let's just get started at the very beginning. And that is probably the number one question that is on the mind of a lot of people, and that is, why are there so few drugs for goats in the United States?

Dr. Pat Gorden  2:13 
Why are there so few drugs for food animals in general, in the United States? It's an economics thing. So the process that a drug company has to undergo to show that their drug is not only safe for the animals to be administered to, to be effective for the particular disease condition that we're treating, and then we can demonstrate some kind of a drug depletion time for meat and milk safety of our food animals is a very costly process. We're talking millions and millions and millions of dollars, and the return on the investment for these drug companies, who can only sell their product at a limited cost because otherwise the farmer won't use it because it's not cost-effective to them, really limits their return on their investment. So we have the problem across the entire industry. It's just more pronounced on the small ruminant side.

Deborah Niemann  3:03 
Because there's a lot less goats than cattle and swine, right?

Dr. Michelle Buckley  3:07 
Absolutely.

Dr. Pat Gorden  3:08 
Lot smaller too.

Deborah Niemann  3:09 
Yeah. So obviously, most people are thinking like, well, if I need a drug for my goats, it's hard to find it. But are there any other consequences of having so few drugs labeled for goats?

Dr. Michelle Buckley  3:20 
I mean this, it definitely requires a lot more collaboration with your veterinarian to get extra label recommendations for drug use for small ruminants. Sheep have really similar issues, and so that's kind of another hurdle that producers face. It's not just getting their hands on a drug that is labeled for them, it's now you have to involve a veterinarian, because all antimicrobial products are prescription only as of, what, two years ago. So yeah, that adds another level of difficulty. You can't just go buy it at the store anymore, and that is also true for cattle and any other food animal as well. But again, financially, a lot of veterinarians, you know, it pays better to work with the larger cattle producers than the small scale, small ruminant folks, especially folks that may just have a couple of animals in the backyard. So I definitely think that's probably a challenge.

Deborah Niemann  4:09 
Yeah, so I know a lot of people have heard the term extra-label drug use, and unfortunately, what floats around social media is that, oh, nothing's approved for goats, so everything you're using is extra-label or off-label, and people erroneously think that means they can just use whatever they want and call it off-label. Can you explain what that term really means?

Dr. Pat Gorden  4:30 
Yeah, it means that it's being used in any manner different than what is printed on the manufacturer's label, not a veterinarian's sticker that they put on it, what the manufacturer has on the label. So it may be that we're using a small animal or a human drug in livestock, it may mean that we're treating a different condition than what the drug is approved for. So we may have a drug that's approved for treatment of respiratory disease, but we're using it to treat something other than respiratory disease. It may mean that we're using a different dose, mils per day, it may mean that we're using it more often per day, longer. Anything that's different than what the manufacturer's label says is considered to be extra label, and in many cases, that's legal for us in veterinary medicine, with a few exceptions to practice that because back to the first question that you ask us, why are there not more approved drugs? Well, this is the FDA's mechanism to help veterinarians and producers out is to allow for this extra label therapy.

Deborah Niemann  5:28 
Okay? And so in what situations is off label drug use legal and appropriate?

Dr. Michelle Buckley  5:33 
Okay. So anytime we're using drugs in an extra label manner has to be under the direct supervision of a veterinarian. There also needs to be no on-label options that are appropriate for that situation. And in the case of goats, there are very few on label options period. So that's usually a pretty easy one to fill, but again, should be talking with your veterinarian before we make any decisions there.

Dr. Michelle Buckley  5:55 
We also need to make sure that the medication isn't on the list of drugs that are banned from use in food animals, period. So that would be drugs like chloramphenicol or metronidazole, which metronidazole we do use in small animals or companion animals, but we are not allowed to use it in food producing animals. And there's a list that the FDA has put together. So again, your veterinarian can help you navigate that. And most of those drugs are, you know, they don't even make those labeled for any food animals, so it shouldn't really even be a consideration. But, yeah, those are kind of the three main things.

Dr. Pat Gorden  6:31 
Did you say make sure that there's no residue at the end of the use? So we need to make sure that we provide a sufficiently long withdrawal period or withholding period to make sure that the meat and or the milk is safe for human consumption once that treatment is complete.

Deborah Niemann  6:48 
So many people have a very hard time understanding that toltrazuril, which is like baycox, is not okay. It's one of those things that's considered illegal to use in goats, but everybody and their cousin on social media says, to give that to your goats for coccidiosis. Could you talk about that drug specifically a little bit.

Dr. Michelle Buckley  7:11 
My understanding is it's not actually illegal, but that's why I want Pat to chime in on this. My understanding is it's not actually illegal, it's just very, very frowned upon because we don't want to instill resistance, and there are other labeled options for coccidia in goats.

Deborah Niemann  7:27 
So I know that FDA has sent cease and desist letters to people who sell it, who advertise it for that.

Dr. Pat Gorden  7:34 
Yeah, so one of the limits of extra label drug use is we can't advertise this extra label use, right? I need to have a veterinary client patient relationship with my client, right? So my client comes and says, I have a really bad coccidia problem, right? We can discuss, what are our on label options? Are these working right? And could we get to the recommendation to use this particular product right? Again, is it on the prohibited list? Is there another product that's effective? And then can we get a withdrawal time on the backside that is effective to prevent a residue in the species that we're using in it?

Deborah Niemann  8:15 
So what is the downside of somebody like just going on to a very popular online shopping site and purchasing this that's labeled for dogs, for example.

Dr. Michelle Buckley  8:27 
Yeah. I mean, the big concern is residues in the food. If you don't have a withdrawal recommendation from your veterinarian, from FARAD, the Food Animal Residue Avoidance Databank, then you have no idea if you know how long it's going to take that medication to get out of the animal system. So if you're using milk from that animal, could be contaminated with the drug, for all you know. If you're processing that animal for meat, same thing. And some drugs hang around for a really, really, really long time.

Dr. Michelle Buckley  8:55 
I mean, like the antibiotic class, aminoglycides, which not related to toltrazuril, but just as an example, hangs around for years. The withdrawal period is literally years, which is why we don't use those drugs. It's not illegal, it's just there's no point. So you don't have any idea if you're contaminating the food supply or not. You could also be creating resistance, and especially in, you know, a class of drugs where we are very limited in what we have available already, like the coccidiostats, just using drugs without recommendation scientific, science-based recommendations can be really dangerous to the general health of your animals.

Dr. Michelle Buckley  9:34 
And, you know, other goats. If you're moving animals on and off your property, they could also be exposed to this resistance as well, exactly the issue that we see with dewormers now. Using things willy nilly tends to get us into trouble. And a lot of times, I think we forget when we talk about drugs, that drugs are not the end all, be all, and there's a big management component to especially issues like coccidia as well, where you know it's not just hit it with the next drug that you can get your hands on. We really need to take a step back and say, What can we improve about our management to keep animals from getting sick from this disease?

Dr. Pat Gorden  10:07 
I'll give you a calf example. We have protozoa called cryptosporidia, and for years, all we tried to do is try to kill the cryptosporidia in these baby calves. And we finally realized that that was kind of futile, because we don't have many products that really do it, and we've had all this fly by night stuff that came along, and we've realized through the years that one of the most effective control mechanisms for controlling cryptosporidia on baby calves, on top of hygiene, is feeding them better, feeding their immune system, and letting them work through it, right? And I'm not saying that that would be the example here for coccidia in goats, but a lot of times, management of many different approaches can be as or more effective than the magic potion. And there's a lot of magic potions on this list over here of home remedies that are that I've come up with so far.

Dr. Michelle Buckley  10:52 
Pat I think you're actually spot on with that analogy, and they very much perform the same way, or, you know, affect animals the same way. Andrea Mangini has told me, all goats get coccidia, but not all goats get coccidiosis, so they're all going to be infected with that bug, but not all of them are going to show clinical signs. And you're spot on feeding them through the disease and through that high risk period, and allowing their immune system to fight it off is exactly the key. So I think that could play a big role in helping people understand a better way to approach managing that particular one.

Deborah Niemann  11:25 
Dr Gorden, were you the vet who told the story about the dairy who was very upset about antibiotics being made prescription-only because they truly believed that all other baby goats needed antibiotics and it turned out to be a management problem.

Dr. Pat Gorden  11:40 
I think that was Dr Plummer.

Deborah Niemann  11:42 
Okay, yeah. And then it turned out that they were only giving like four cc's of colostrum to each kid, and letting the colostrum sit in a warm water bath all day where it grew E coli.

Dr. Pat Gorden  11:54 
Yes, that was Dr Plummer.

Deborah Niemann  11:56 
And so it was 100% a management problem that they were trying to solve with antibiotics. So why are almost all antibiotics now prescription only, even the ones that people used to be able to get over the counter?

Dr. Pat Gorden  12:10 
That's a great question, one that we answered a lot over the last couple of years. So it's part of a long term plan by the FDA to limit antimicrobial resistance in human and veterinary medicine. And long and short of this is that many of the antibiotics that we use in veterinary medicine are also used by human medicine people. So both sets of doctors, human and veterinary are concerned about our drugs no longer working in the future, right?

Dr. Pat Gorden  12:39 
The human doctors are concerned that antimicrobial resistance is developing because of overuse in the food animal side, and then the exposure of those resistant bacteria to humans through food consumption or people working with those animals and whatnot. And so the FDA felt that one way to get better stewardship of antimicrobials was to limit the sales through veterinarians.

Dr. Pat Gorden  13:01 
And so when a client wants to use a particular product, they have to go to the veterinarian for consultation on how to properly use it, just like when I go to the pharmacy to pick up my prescription, I have to talk to the pharmacist about how to use this drug appropriately, even though I'm a pharmacist myself, right? And so if it's just one person at a time that we can educate on how to do this better, how to be better stewards of what we do, the FDA is convinced that that will help reduce antimicrobial use across all species and help limit the amount of resistance that's developing.

Dr. Michelle Buckley  13:37 
I would like to point out it's the same for people. You can't just go to the store and pick up a bottle of penicillin off the shelf. And if you could, people would be popping penicillin like Pez. We'd be taking it constantly for the least sniffle when a lot of the things that we deal with are you can't antibiotic them away. A lot of the underlying causes of diseases we deal with are viral or parasitic or management based, and so working with your veterinarian can help to make sure that we're using our best discretion.

Dr. Michelle Buckley  14:04 
I'd also point out that this is a challenge for producers. You know, there are more growing numbers every year of veterinarians that are knowledgeable about sheep and goat medicine, but I definitely think it's important to acknowledge that this is a barrier to producers in finding vets that are willing to write those prescriptions and willing to see their animals, because it hasn't really been a thing or a way that people could, you know, earn a living for a long time. But I think that we're working on catching up on that now, and I think a lot of vet schools are really focusing on that, and there's a lot of Continuing Education focusing on that as well. So I want producers to understand that we do understand that need, and it's not unrecognized.

Dr. Pat Gorden  14:42 
And I would say that there's a lot of veterinarians that make a living selling drugs, but there's a lot more out there that make a living in preventative medicine. I mean, I write scripts for my farms to go buy their medicines through a pharmacy at the lowest cost they can find it right, because I want them to understand that I'm not making money on the recommendations to use products to treat animals in their farm, right? I'm putting the best protocols that I think are evidence based on their farms. You find the product works, which most cost effective from you, and if that's me, then that's fine. It oftentimes isn't. The veterinarians weren't asking for this as a way to bolster their checkbooks.

Deborah Niemann  15:16 
Yeah, I know. I definitely heard from a lot of vets that they did not want to be become a pharmacy for people, it was more convenient for you to just say, Oh, go pick up the drug at a farm store, rather than having to take the time to dispense it or pay somebody to do that, you know, in your office. So a lot of goat owners, typically people who were around before it became illegal for a lot of these drugs to be over the counter will ask, why can't they just keep antibiotics on hand for emergencies? And you've given us some good reasons for that already. But is there anything else we should be thinking about?

Dr. Pat Gorden  15:51 
It's not illegal for a goat dairy, a goat farm, to have drugs stored on the farm, right? I mean, in the fall and winter, maybe they deal with a lot of respiratory disease, and they historically have always done that, and in working with their veterinarian, it's not a bad idea to have those products on hand for that exact reason. You don't know how long it might be before you need somebody to get there, but if the people on my farms can diagnose this stuff, right, we've trained them to do that, they can use those products underneath my written protocols, and that's part of the written description that I need to have in place to allow for extra label use, which almost everything that we do is extra label use, right? And so it's not illegal to have the drugs stored there. And in fact, the dairy farms that I work for, they store products on their farms all the time.

Deborah Niemann  16:35 
Yeah, I think a lot of people overestimate their need for drugs. And you know, if you go on Facebook, it sounds like goats are just getting sick left and right, and that everybody needs all the drugs, and there's massive overdiagnosis of illness on there. But really, I was probably one of the few people who really wasn't too upset because I would keep a bottle of like biomycin and penicillin on hand, just in case. And I threw away so many bottles that never had the seal broken. You know, they would sit there for two or three years. I would never break the seal. And then I'm like, well, it's expired, so I'm throwing it away now.

Dr. Pat Gorden  17:17 
That's part of the overall drug inventory management that kind of goes in the whole circle there, right? We have historical incidents of disease on the farms, right? Put protocols in place that are effective against those historical diseases, and then kind of keep an inventory on hand to be able to deal with those in a timely manner, you know, in an appropriate way, right? But, you know, a bottle of Biomyocin and a bottle of penicillin aren't costing you too much, but when we start to deal with some of these antibiotics that are, you know, hundreds of dollars for a bottle, you don't want to waste too many of those, you know, the Draxins and, you know, some of these newer respiratory antibiotics, there's a lot more money there that you don't want to be wasting.

Deborah Niemann  17:53 
Yeah, exactly.

Dr. Michelle Buckley  17:55 
I think your point about the information from Facebook groups also just highlights, you know, the lack of good information and good resources that goat owners have historically faced and the lack of veterinary resources. But I really think that in the last 5, 10, definitely 10 years, but even the last five years, those resources have started to develop, and I would encourage producers to have a little more faith in their veterinarian's ability to work up their problem, and also, you know, reach out. In the past, goats have been pretty disease riddled, I think, and challenged in the management areas, but we know a lot more about how to keep goats healthy now, and so I think that really needs to be the focus.

Dr. Pat Gorden  18:37 
Yeah, this is probably a really good place to do a little shameless plug for some of Michelle's work. You mentioned that we met at Iowa State. We really did. She was in California. I recruited her to come to Iowa because of the weather here, but it was really to work on dairy goats. We got a grant in 2020 to do a mastitis or a milk quality improvement study, and a portion of that was to do outreach, extension, if you will, to dairy goat producers, and we developed a website that I'll get you the link for we can put it in the show notes. We've since rolled into a new, larger multi state grant that I'm working with from people in California and Tennessee and around the country here that has a lot of good information on it also. And then I'd also kind of point towards the American Association of Small Ruminant practitioners has a podcast also called Baa’s and Bleats.

Dr. Michelle Buckley  19:25 
Baa’s and Bleats

Dr. Pat Gorden  19:26 
That Dr Buckley actually did the first year of those episodes, kind of through our grant, our original grant, when she was here at Iowa State. So there's some really good material out there on those sources. Also, we'll get you links to those in your show notes,

Dr. Michelle Buckley  19:40 
And more information coming from this big project that Dr Gorden's got in the works.

Deborah Niemann  19:44 
Yeah, definitely. And that means you'll have to come back and talk about it.

Dr. Michelle Buckley  19:48 
Yeah, Pat.

Dr. Pat Gorden  19:49 
Deborah, you only knew how many goats I deal with on a regular basis. It's pretty small.

Dr. Michelle Buckley  19:54 
It's pretty funny that he's really becoming the goat guy, because that's not his historical MO, but I think it suits him.

Dr. Pat Gorden  20:01 
I did enjoy speaking at the American Dairy Goat Association meeting. That crowd was engaged. I was three hours of easy talking because they just kept asking questions after questions after questions.

Dr. Michelle Buckley  20:09 
That is one really awesome thing about dairy goat producers, is they are so hungry for information. And I think, you know, it's really easy as a veterinarian to say, Oh, the Facebook groups, they're the worst. But like, I think it's really just a demonstration of how hungry producers are for information. I would also argue that Facebook or forums might not be the best place to find good information, but I understand that you know that is a challenge, but yeah, goat owners want to learn, and even when you tell them you're doing everything wrong, you're killing your goats, you're incubating bacteria in this, you know, lukewarm colostrum all day long, they're like, “Okay, great, I'll do it better. Thank you so much.” And you don't get that with every producer that you work with in any area of veterinary medicine, but that's been my experience with the goat owners.

Deborah Niemann  21:01 
Yeah, exactly. They do definitely want to learn more. So I know a lot of times when people do have antibiotics on hand, and it is expired that they are very tempted to use it. What are your thoughts on expired antibiotics?

Dr. Pat Gorden  21:19 
We don't know. What we do know is that the company has proven that the product is efficacious for the period of time in which the product is labeled. So from the time it's manufactured until the time the withdrawal period has lapsed, the company has demonstrated that the product will remain efficacious during that timeframe. The day after that - I doubt it's going to be 0% effective, but there's no data to support using it after the withdrawal time, right?

Deborah Niemann  21:44 
Yeah.

Dr. Pat Gorden  21:45 
So all we know is that they've proven for this period of time that it's effective.

Dr. Michelle Buckley  21:49 
And to go along with that efficacy, we also understand how the drug is going to behave when it's leaving the body during that period, and so our food safety and our residue avoidance is relatively well understood during that period, but as the drug moves past that period that it's been studied for, we probably don't really know what happens to the drug. How is it breaking down? Are those breakdown products changing the withdrawal periods and safety margins and things like that? So it's not just an efficacy thing. It also, I think, ties back into food safety.

Deborah Niemann  22:25 
Yeah, the last time somebody asked me about that, I said it depends on how important this animal is to you, because of exactly what Dr Gorden just said, like, we don't know how long they're good. And so if this animal is really, really important to you, then I would call the vet to get a proper diagnosis and an antibiotic that is not expired. But if this animal is not really important to you, either financially or emotionally, and you're like, Well, I got it, I might as well try it. You know, it's like, not great. But ...

Dr. Michelle Buckley  22:57 
I think the other component to that decision making process is what we owe to the animal. Why are we wasting our resources and this animal's, you know, well-being on something that we don't know if it's going to work, I think we have that basic responsibility to all the animals that we care for. And if you're not willing to put the money in, that's fine. Humane euthanasia is an option. Or, you know, finding someone else who can give the animal proper care is an option. But half-hearted treatment, to me, is just not an acceptable standard of animal welfare. So I'll really twist the knife there, make people feel guilty.

Dr. Pat Gorden  23:20 
Yeah, and as a veterinarian, we absolutely cannot recommend that they would use an expired product. We just don't know, no idea. And so all I can do when they ask the questions, like, I don't know. I cannot recommend you do it.

Deborah Niemann  23:47 
Yeah, what are some practical steps that goat owners can take to reduce antibiotic use overall?

Dr. Michelle Buckley  23:52 
I feel like I'm really going to end up just plugging working with your veterinarian. But like, it really is true, finding a vet who either knows about raising goats, small ruminants in general, and/or, you know, trying to find one, even if they're not super close to you. But use the AASRP website. The American Association of Small Ruminant Practitioners has a website where they have, like, a find the vet page. Find a vet page, so you can go on there and look in your area. But you know, have someone come out, walk through your farm, do an evaluation and say, Where are we at? What are your goals? What are your weak points, areas that you'd like to improve on? What are you things that you think you do well, what are your management practices, your nutrition and having an outside perspective on a lot of those things can really be enlightening. As far as practices that you can change so that you don't need antibiotics in a lot of cases. I'm not going to say we never need antibiotics, but we can reduce the need substantially when we improve, like Dr Gorden said earlier, nutrition and management and things like that.

Dr. Pat Gorden  24:55 
Yeah, that was the thing that I was going to say, a good nutritionist, somebody who's got expertise in feeding small ruminants, not a cattle. They're different, right? But if I have good nutritional consultation on the farms that I work for, my life's a lot easier, right? Because of all the basics of good nutrition, feeding the immune system and having healthy animals and whatnot is essential. And just because a person works for a feed company doesn't mean that they have a lot of expertise in the area. So, you know, that's the place to rely on others who are, you know, in the industry, to find out who the good nutritionists are. I think that's to me as or maybe I hate to say this more important in the veterinarian.

Deborah Niemann  25:34 
That's okay. Dr Vansaun, from Penn State University, has been on and he said that, you know, when he became a vet he thought he was going to be treating all of these sick animals and making them well again. And then he realized that if they just got the nutrition right, they didn't need him. And he's been on multiple times to talk about a lot of different nutritional diseases and stuff, you know, that old saying, what is it? An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure?

Dr. Michelle Buckley  25:58 
Yeah.

Deborah Niemann  25:59 
As absolutely correct. And there was a very old vet that I met years and years ago who said that he's known a lot of producers who've gone broke successfully treating sick animals. It's like that can't be your plan is to just...

Dr. Pat Gorden  26:12 
Well, the reality of it is, and that tells us, in vet school, is like, your best day, because you just saved this, did this surgery, whatever is the producer's worst day. Those really shouldn't be hand in hand, right? You want your producer to stay in business so you have clients for the future, right? That's the mentality that I think we need to maintain, is, let's, let's help our clients be better through nutrition, good veterinary care, preventative medicine, all that stuff.

Dr. Michelle Buckley  26:39 
I think that's kind of been the lens that producers have seen vets through. In the past is like, I have a sick animal, I have to call the vet, when, really, vets can be so much more helpful if we get to your farm before there's a problem, when we can prevent a lot of problems. I tell people, you know, the day that there's no sick animals is the day I'm out of work, and I really hope that day comes, but for right now, there's a lot of job security and dealing with sick animals. But also, I think there's a lot of opportunity for, you know, catching things before they become a problem.

Deborah Niemann  27:10 
What do you wish every goat owner knew or understood about medications and antimicrobial stewardship?

Dr. Pat Gorden  27:18 
You know, there is no action that doesn't have a consequence, right? And it becomes a risk reward, right? Can I effectively use this antimicrobial and get a successful treatment right with any antimicrobial administration, right? Whether it's to treat respiratory disease, mastitis, whatever, the entire body is exposed to that drug, depending upon the drug of where it's administered. So you're going to create resistance no matter what, to some extent. Our goal is to have that be minimized because we use an appropriate dose for a proper period of time, and then get the antibiotic out of the animal and get the animal back in the herd, right? And so there's really no way that I can utilize an antibiotic and not create resistance. But in some situations, we really need to save the animal's life. So in the long run, we get back to the preventative thing here, right? If we can prevent the disease, we don't have to use the antimicrobials.

Dr. Michelle Buckley  28:12 
To piggyback on that. I think a lot of people hear antimicrobials and drugs and they think, Oh, well, that's dangerous, it's unhealthy, it's a chemical. Let me try a natural remedy. As Dr Gorden pointed out, there are, of course, risks and inherent changes that we make to the body when we give drugs like antibiotics. But the one benefit, and the reason that I still use antibiotics for myself, my children, my pets, my patients, when it's appropriate, is that we have a lot of data about the effects that those things have on the body. We don't know everything, and it would be foolish to tell you that we do, but we know a lot, and we know a lot more than we know about homeopathic remedies.

Dr. Michelle Buckley  28:56 
So I think a lot of people say, you know it's safe because it comes from nature. Well, most antibiotics also come from nature. They're natural compounds that we figured out how to make synthetically, and we produce them in higher concentrations than they're found in nature. But I think that's a slippery slope. When people get into, you know, natural, all natural, whatever, homeopathic stuff, and you know, I'm sure that it works, and it has for a long time, long before we started, you know, manufacturing antibiotics in some capacity, but we just don't really understand it. And so I think that's just something to keep in mind when we talk about using antibiotics or treating disease in general.

Deborah Niemann  29:33 
Yeah, and I know I have massive experience with parasites, because my farm had complete dewormer resistance back 20 years ago. And one of the things that I learned is that, yeah, a lot of those natural remedies do kill some parasites, but they kill a small number, you know, like 50% and so if an animal is not horribly debilitated, killing 50% can be helpful. But some of them are just so far gone that killing 50% is not, you're not even going to see any kind of a difference whatsoever in their health conditions.

Deborah Niemann  30:08 
So, you know, it's just, I mean, they invented better drugs because we needed something better. You know, you don't want something that's going to work 50% of the time or 20% of the time. You want something that's going to work as close to 100% of the time as possible. And my daughter did her PhD on antimicrobial resistance, and so I heard a lot about it eight or nine years ago. And you know, it's like, you've got to be smart about using them so that they work when you need them.

Dr. Michelle Buckley  30:37 
Yeah. And so you need as little as possible for the shortest duration as possible, but you know, at least we have information about efficacy and residues and things like that for drugs that go through FDA approval, which we just don't have that for other substances. And I personally just wouldn't recommend assuming those are safe because they're natural.

Deborah Niemann  30:59 
Yeah. And one of the things that somebody said, I don't remember, at the ADGA conference, was that over 50% of mastitis infections will just clear on their own. So I'm like, Oh, now I understand why some people say these really weird things work, because there's a 50% chance that a goat would have just cleared on their own. So the goat probably did just clear it on their own, and it had nothing to do with the weird thing that they gave the goat, that they gave all the credit to.

Dr. Pat Gorden  31:28 
That was actually Dr Buckley's research that looked at coagulase negative staphs, or non aureus staphs, in goats at the end of their lactating period, that 50% of those bacteria cured.

Deborah Niemann  31:39 
Yeah.

Dr. Pat Gorden  31:39 
Right. If we treated them 85% cure so we got a much better cure rate by using an antimicrobial. But what was also apparent is that high percentage of animals got reinfected or newly infected during the dry period also. So just picking up Dr Buckley's research and going, well, I can get 85% cure rate here by just using dry therapy at the end of the lactation. Well, you got to take care of the beginning of the next lactation too, and prevent them from getting reinfected also. So as you said, research is great, but it's one focused area that we're looking at, and it's much more bigger picture when it comes to improving milk quality on any dairy farm, right?

Deborah Niemann  32:14 
Yeah,

Dr. Pat Gorden  32:14 
She's the antibiotic.

Deborah Niemann  32:14 
Yeah. And that means we're going to have to have you back, Dr Buckley, to talk about that study, because that was excellent. I have a long list of things I wanted to do, and that was one of them. So I would love to talk more in depth about mastitis, because I have a really sad story to share with everybody about mastitis and how I learned the hard way, so you don't have to that you don't mess around with mastitis.

Dr. Michelle Buckley  32:42 
Oh, I'm sorry. Well, I would be happy to chat with you, as long as we can talk about some happy stuff too. But I think it's important to learn from other people's bad experiences so..

Deborah Niemann  32:52 
Yeah, exactly. So this has been really fabulous. If there is one big takeaway that you would like people to have after listening to this episode about using antibiotics, what would it be?

Dr. Pat Gorden  33:05 
Antibiotics are an essential component of treating sick animals that have the right type of infection, right? Animals with the flu virus, as we experienced in the dairy cow world over the last year, antibiotics aren't going to touch that, right? Humans with a cold, antibiotics aren't going to touch it. So there's no reason that we take antibiotics for everything, you know. So work with your veterinarian and establish good treatment protocols. If you have historical incidents of disease at certain times, have some product on hand, have a protocol in place and use them judiciously.

Dr. Michelle Buckley  33:34 
Yeah, I think to piggyback on that. Just remember that there's more to treating and preventing disease than drugs. And I think if we can be open minded into reviewing our management and nutrition and husbandry protocols, most farms can decrease the amount of drugs that they need to use pretty substantially. Sometimes it's hard to get on top of those things, because there's a reason we do things a certain way, and most farms are pretty short staffed or only being managed by one or two people, but I think there's a lot of room for improvement and willingness to improve among goat owners, so give it a try.

Deborah Niemann  34:11 
Thank you so much. This has been really helpful, and I hope people have a much better understanding now of all of the different things floating around out there about using antibiotics in goats. Thanks for joining us.

Dr. Pat Gorden  34:22 
Thank you.

Dr. Michelle Buckley  34:23 
Thanks for having us.

Deborah Niemann  34:24 
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 at facebook.com/lovegoatspodcast. See you again next time. Bye for now you.