Like I mentioned, mineral deficiencies can be difficult to assess.
For instance, Daisy walks on her hocks on her back feet. When I first noticed it, she was about 6 months old. I Googled it, but nothing mentioned minerals, only trimming. So I kept her trimmed up but it didn’t help.
After a while, we figured it was a defect and wondered about culling her. We thought we would try to breed her first and see how she looked in milk and go from there.
Well, she ended up losing a kid at birth, who had low muscle tone. I finally had my answer—selenium deficiency. This mineral will cause both of these issues (feet and muscle tone) however it presented as a small foot problem for over a year with no pain, so we missed it.
To deal with our selenium issues, we injected our goats with Bose. Bose is a selenium supplement you can only get from your vet. There is an OTC one you can get. (Here’s the one we buy.) We mostly rely on the Bose.
Typically, you only need to give this once a year right before breeding, but since we had so many problems, we gave it to them in May. We also just gave them some more, as we are starting to breed now, in October.
We noticed Daisy’s feet were much better throughout the summer, although not completely fixed. I’m not sure what else to do for her and her feet.
Although, nobody else has any selenium deficiencies, we aren’t taking any chances with losing kids, so everyone gets a shot to be on the safe side.