Worming for Goats, Feet and the Routine That Keeps Them Well

This is the page where we are most careful about the line between keeping animals and treating them. We keep pygmy goats in west Cornwall and we can tell you what the authorities publish and what the routine looks like. We give no doses and no drug schedules, because those are a veterinary decision for an individual animal, and on goats that is not a formality. It sits alongside our guide to keeping pygmy goats.

The fact that changes everything else on this page

NADIS, the veterinary bulletin service, states it plainly: there are no wormers licensed for goats in the UK, meaning none holds a marketing authorisation for the species, and a vet will generally advise a product licensed for another species, usually sheep, under the principle known as the cascade.

The same is true of vaccines. The RSPCA states there are currently no vaccines legally authorised for goats in the UK unless under prescription from a veterinary surgeon. NADIS says the same, that vets face a lack of licensed products including vaccines for goats.

Two consequences follow, and they are the reason this page will not give you numbers.

First, goats do not process these drugs like sheep. NADIS records that certain wormer groups require different rates in goats than in sheep and publishes the multipliers. We have deliberately not reproduced them. The point for a keeper is not the figure, it is that reading a sheep product's label and dosing your goat from it is not a shortcut, it is a mistake.

Second, everything is a prescription. There is no over the counter answer available to you, so the vet is not an optional extra in goat health, they are the mechanism by which you are allowed to treat at all.

Why blind worming stopped being good practice

Because it stopped working, and there is evidence from the next county.

A study published in the Veterinary Record in 2022 ran faecal egg count reduction tests on 13 farms in north Devon. On average those farms had resistance to three anthelmintic classes, and no farm was susceptible to all the wormers tested. Resistance was more prevalent in 2016 than on the same farms in 2013. Haemonchus was present on 85% of them. That is sheep data, and it is the closest published evidence to this ground that exists.

SCOPS, the sheep parasite body, explains the mechanism: dosing everything and moving them to clean pasture selected heavily for resistance, because any worm surviving treatment was likely resistant and then enjoyed an extended reproductive advantage. The modern approach keeps a susceptible population in refugia to dilute resistant genetics.

One honest gap: SCOPS is Sustainable Control of Parasites in Sheep, and its guidance does not mention goats at all. There is no goat equivalent in the UK. NADIS Goat Health 3 is the nearest goat specific authority, and that is worth knowing before you read sheep guidance as though it were written for you.

Faecal egg counts, and a tenfold disagreement

A faecal egg count counts worm eggs in dung and reports them as eggs per gram. SCOPS gives three uses: helping decide whether to treat, checking whether a treatment worked, and estimating how much contamination is going onto the pasture.

It has limits, and SCOPS is clear about them. Counts are for monitoring, not for diagnosis. An animal must be healthy and on full feed for the result to mean anything, and where an animal is severely ill with suspected parasitic gastro-enteritis a worm count at post mortem is a far better estimate of burden.

Now the disagreement, and we are not going to resolve it for you. The Pygmy Goat Club says goats need testing twice a year. AHDB says counts should ideally be carried out every two to four weeks during the grazing season. That is roughly a tenfold difference in effort and cost.

The likely explanation, offered as reasoning rather than as a sourced fact, is that AHDB writes for commercial flocks at high stocking rates and the Pygmy Goat Club writes for a few pets in a paddock. Neither says so. What both agree on is that you test rather than guess, and your vet sets the interval for your herd on your ground.

The parasites, and what each one actually looks like

Collected from NADIS's goat bulletins and its fluke guidance, because they are published across several pages and nobody puts them side by side.

Parasite	What it does	The sign to watch for
Gastrointestinal roundworms	Gut damage. Goats build very poor immunity and stay susceptible for life	Diarrhoea and weight loss
Haemonchus contortus, barber's pole worm	Sucks blood in the fourth stomach	Anaemia and weight loss. Diarrhoea is not a feature
Coccidiosis	Affects young kids, especially reared intensively	Blood and mucous stained diarrhoea, straining, abdominal pain
Liver fluke	Life cycle of 8 to 12 weeks through a mud snail	Weight loss, diarrhoea, fluid swelling under the jaw
Lungworm	Completes its cycle in the respiratory tract	Respiratory signs. Needs veterinary diagnosis
Lice and mange mites	Skin. DEFRA requires regular inspection for both	Restlessness, scratching, rubbing, coat damage
Ticks, mainly the sheep tick	Active once mean weekly temperature exceeds about 7 degrees	Attached ticks. Inactive through winter

Every one of these is a veterinary diagnosis, not a webpage diagnosis. All read 7 September 2026.

The worm that does not cause scour

If you learn one clinical thing from this page, learn this one.

Haemonchus contortus, the barber's pole worm, sucks blood in the fourth stomach. NADIS records that it causes anaemia and weight loss, and that diarrhoea is not a feature. A keeper watching for scour as the sign of a worm problem will watch straight past it. It was present on 85% of those north Devon farms.

The other parasites NADIS names for goats: general roundworms causing diarrhoea and weight loss, against which goats never build proper immunity; coccidiosis in young kids, especially when reared intensively, with blood and mucous stained diarrhoea and straining in acute cases; liver fluke, whose life cycle takes eight to twelve weeks and involves a mud snail, producing weight loss, diarrhoea and often a fluid swelling under the jaw; and lungworm.

Fluke deserves a Cornish footnote. The snail needs wet, warm conditions above roughly 7 to 10 degrees from late spring to mid autumn. Wet western grazing is exactly that habitat, and NADIS notes acute disease is usually seen from August to October.

Feet, and a genuine argument about trimming

The Pygmy Goat Club says hooves need trimming every four to six weeks. DEFRA, paragraph 50, says close attention should be given to the condition of the feet and, where necessary, regular foot trimming should be carried out. Note the conditional. The British Goat Society says feet must be regularly trimmed and gives no interval.

And AHDB, writing about sheep, says something close to the opposite: avoid trimming feet unless absolutely necessary, and do not trim into the sensitive tissues that bleed. On footrot specifically it says do not foot trim or foot bathe, because these are not effective treatments.

The mechanism behind that warning is toe granuloma, where fleshy tissue grows out through the sole as a red pea sized ball that bleeds easily, and AHDB names excessive foot trimming as the most frequent trigger.

How to hold both: AHDB is writing about sheep, and about diseased feet, so it is not a straight rebuttal of routine trimming on a pygmy goat standing on soft Cornish ground. But the granuloma mechanism applies to any over-trimmed ruminant foot. The honest position is that feet are inspected on a schedule and trimmed on their condition, not on the calendar, and that the RSPCA is right that this is a potentially injurious process and new keepers should get proper instruction from an expert before attempting it.

On wet ground, NADIS notes that constant wet or muddy conditions underfoot can predispose to scald and potentially lead to footrot, and that sharp stones and hedge fragments cause their own damage. That is most of a Cornish winter, which is why dry ground is a health question and not only a comfort one.

What to watch for is not just a limp. The RSPCA's list is a cluster: a goat starting to limp, favouring a leg, becoming reluctant to stand, or leaning while grazing. Act on any of them.

Vaccination, lice and the rest of the routine

Goats in the UK are vaccinated against clostridial disease, and NADIS says all goats kept here are potentially susceptible to enterotoxaemia associated with Clostridium perfringens. The Pygmy Goat Club says vaccination against enterotoxaemia will be required and that your vet will advise. The British Goat Society names tetanus as included in the clostridial cover.

On booster frequency the published intervals cluster around six months, with NADIS noting goats need boosting more often than other species, and the RSPCA giving four to six months in an older document while its current page simply says talk to your vet about which vaccinations and how often. Given that no vaccine is authorised for goats without prescription, the programme is your vet's to set, and we will not print an interval as though it were ours.

For external parasites, DEFRA names lice and mange as the skin infections goats are susceptible to and requires regular inspection. The Pygmy Goat Club treats routinely against lice in autumn and spring. Four mite species are recorded in UK goats, and the source for that detail is Farm Health Online, published by Duchy College Rural Business School here in Cornwall. Ticks matter too: the sheep tick is the commonest in the British Isles and is generally inactive in winter, becoming active once the mean weekly temperature exceeds about 7 degrees.

When to call the vet, and what must be reported

DEFRA's trigger is the cleanest published: seek prompt veterinary advice if the goat appears seriously ill or in pain, if the cause is not clear, or if what you have done is not working. Any one of the three is enough.

The RSPCA adds specifics. Diarrhoea lasting more than 24 hours, blood in the faeces, or a goat deteriorating quickly. Any scour or off colour kid is immediate, because dehydration can kill them rapidly. NADIS adds a subtler one worth carrying: as goats get worse they get quieter, and a quiet goat is never a good sign.

Some diseases you are legally obliged to report to APHA. For sheep and goats gov.uk names anthrax, bluetongue, brucellosis, foot and mouth disease, goat pox and scrapie, and the reporting line is 03000 200 301. Failure to report is an offence. Note one wrinkle: sheep scab appears on the UK wide notifiable collection, but the disease specific guidance makes it notifiable in Scotland rather than England, so for a Cornish holding the disease specific page governs.

Two conditions worth knowing by name because they are bought in rather than caught: caprine arthritis encephalitis, which usually shows as arthritic lameness in goats over six months and spreads mainly through infected colostrum or milk, and Johne's disease, which NADIS says is greatly under-diagnosed and in sheep is characterised by emaciation rather than the chronic diarrhoea seen in cattle. Both are arguments for testing incoming animals rather than trusting a handshake.

Where to read on

The ground these problems come off is covered in land, space and shelter, the feeding side is in what goats eat, and the paperwork that goes with reporting disease is in the CPH number and goat paperwork.