Parvo is a terrifying disease that can easily kill your dog if it goes untreated. It can suck big time if your dog gets it, which is a good reason to vaccinate your puppies. But should you be worried about your goats?
Goats can’t get parvo. Parvo is not able to transfer from dogs to other animals, meaning that the only animals that can get parvo are dogs. Goats can become carriers of Parvo though, meaning that even though they won’t get sick they can potentially infect dogs that haven’t been vaccinated.
Is this good news? For goats, absolutely. Don’t even worry about your goats on this axis. They’ll be fine. For dogs? Not so much. It means that if you plan on keeping your dog with your goats you need to make sure that it’s vaccinated. But how can goats carry a disease without getting sick?
What Is Parvo?
Parvo is a virus that infects canines. That means that it has specifically evolved to make dogs sick, and won’t really hurt other animals.
I’m going to date myself a little here: the year is 2021, and everyone should probably be a little bit of a virologist. But in case you’ve missed a little bit of the science behind the current human pandemic, here’s a quick refresher.
Every virus has a preffered host. Some classic examples of this are toxoplasmosis in cats and the bubonic plague in people. Their evolution for the most part has all been in service of getting them into the body of that host so that they can reproduce.
That means that if certain animals live in close proximity to one another, like humans and cats or fleas and humans, the virus will often become able to survive in the body of the animal that isn’t the target in hopes of getting closer to its preferred home.
Viruses evolve much more quickly than other life forms because they are comparatively simple and produce tons of offspring. This means that a virus can evolve to be carried by another animal in no more than a few years.
Parvo is one such virus. Because dogs tend to exist peacefully with lots of other animals, Parvo has learned to use a pretty significant number of them as vehichles, including goats.
However, anyone even passingly familiar with the 2020 pandemic knows that a virus can potentially evolve to take on an entirely new kind of host, and do so very quickly.
This is unlikely to happen with Parvo for a variety of reasons. For one thing, Parvo already infects much of an entire class of animal, canines. For another, the technique of using creatures like goats as carriers is already pretty good at getting the virus where it wants to go.
In other carrier-virus relationships, the virus hardly ever ends up hurting the carrier (except in the case of toxoplasmosis, which mind controls mice into not fearing cats so the cats will eat them.) Most of the time, animals that act as carriers will never end up showing symptoms.
This is especially important as Parvo is usually transmitted through fecal matter, which it can be difficult to prevent dogs from eating. Animals will poop whether they’re sick or not, so Parvo has no reason to get its carriers sick since it wouldn’t make the virus easier to transmit.
Should I Worry About Dogs Catcing Parvo From Goats?
Eh, probably not. Even if goats can become carriers, it’s actually fairly uncommon. Dogs are much more likely to get parvo from wild animals like foxes or coyotes than goats.
That doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t vaccinate your goat guarding dog though, especially if it’s likely to come into contact with thise particular animals during the course of protecting your goats.
I would worry more about the possibility of the dog getting sick from other dogs on your property than anything else. The easiest way for parvo to move is from dog to dog.
What Can Pass Fron Dogs To Goats
The biggest risk when it comes to dog to goat transmission, is definitely tape or ring worms, coincidentally the same things that are most likely to transfer from dogs to humans.
Parasites like worms are a lot better at moving between species that viruses are, especially among mammals. This is because parasites just need their host to have a specific body part, like skin or intestines, in order for their survival strategy to work.
Worms like this can be a big deal for goats, and more importantly they can be really bad for you if you ever plan on eating them. You can avoid this by not keeping goats in a pasture that dogs have pooped on recently.
Worms can be transmited the other way as well, going from sheep or goats to dogs and humans that might eat them. Using deworming medicine can help alleviate the risks involved for both people and their pets.
Other Goat Diseases
It would be foolish try and keep a comprehensive record of goat diseases here, since even a list of common diseases would probably be longer than I have time for. However, you probably only want to know about the most gruesome possible goat illnesses, so let’s go there.
Goats are really bad at protecting themselves against parasites, meaning that things like lungworms and other nasty creatures are common in goats of all ages. Symptoms can include diarhea, a scruffy coat, and all sorts of other miserable effects.
A variety of diseases can also cause what’s called “chronic wasting,” which is just as horrifying as it sounds.
Loss of balance, failure to produce milk, and other awful symptoms accompany wasting, and many of the causes of it can be highly contagious. It’s recommended that a goat that is wasting be culled as soon as possible to prevent it from spreading whatever it has.
Paratuberculosis is not actually a special kind of tuberculosis that gets dropped from an airplane behind enemy lines. I know, thay was my first thought too.
It’s actually a disease that is the most common in cows. In cows, it can cause a slow and painful death. It can do that in goats too, the main difference being that goats don’t usually have visible symptoms until they die. Fun!