I know there are many people who feel it's inhumane to disbud goats; however, Nigerian Dwarf goats are dairy goats. Dairy goats may not be shown if they have horns. As such, we take the utmost care when we disbud baby goats, and have already disbudded many goats. While some goats still get scurs (small horns that develop after disbudding), we do our best to have a clean disbudding. For best results, disbudding is usually done around 3 days to 2 weeks (as soon as they have developed horn buds). We were taught to disbud by our local veterinarian. Unfortunately he only had a disbudding iron for calves, which almost blinded the kids. After this incident and the injury, we decided to disbud the goats ourselves.
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The first step to the process, as the disbudding iron is pre-heating, is we give the baby goat 1/2 of a children's aspirin that has been crumbled into a fine powder. After giving the baby aspirin I give a Tetanus Antitoxin vaccine. Even if the goats' dam received a CDT shot 4 weeks prior to kidding we prefer to be cautious and vaccinate them against Tetanus. The antitoxin goes directly into the system, whereas a CDT shot slowly goes into a goat's system. The next step is to shave the area so the horn buds are more easily identified. If it is still a little difficult to know where the horn will be then we may choose to mark the area we will need to burn. We always like to remind the baby goats that the difference between a good haircut and a bad haircut is two weeks. HAHA!
We let the disbudding iron preheat for about 10 to 15 minutes prior to use (no longer than that). We use a Rinehart X30 disbudding iron with 3/8" tip. It is best to test the iron on a piece of wood to make sure it is hot enough. The iron is held with medium pressure over the horn bud in a circular motion for about 5 seconds so that the heat burns the entire horn bud. A good disbudding will show nice copper rings around the white cap. The photo on the left shows a cap that is left on the horn after the first burn. I remove this black cap immediately, either with my hand or scissors - some people online actually scoop out the remaining horn bud with a specialty scoop. After burning the first side we blow on the area where the horn was removed because the skull is still hot. We repeat on the other side. We allow the disbudding iron to heat back up and then do the procedure again. The picture on the right shows the darkened side (left horn bud) which has been done twice and cauterized and the horn bud on the right side was still needing to be burned. During the procedure the kid will cry, but they do not like their body and nuzzle being held firmly. They handle pain so much better than we do!
After the disbudding process we let the baby goat run around for a little while so the burned areas can cool down to room temperature. When it is cool we spray the area with Alu-Shield, which is an aluminum bandage. The area doesn't need a bandage for blood since it's been cauterized, but we find the disbudding works better when we put the Alu-Shield on the buds.
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