Where passion for animals, science, and medicine lives…
While many people take St. John’s Wort as an herbal treatment for depression, the plant induces painful sunburns in goats when eaten. Sound crazy? Wondering if you heard that correctly? Yes, St. John Wort is a photodynamic plant. After eating, certain UV-light-absorbing compounds in the plant circulate in the blood of the goat. In white, […]
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In the last podcast, we discussed cyanogenic plants – plants that create cyanide. Some trees are consistent risks, other plants like Sudan grass depend upon environmental conditions. While goats have fewer toxic risks than other ruminants, many threats remain. Alkaloid plants represent another category for concern to the goat producer. Luckily, most of these plants […]
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At the dawn of the 18th Century, in a small Berlin laboratory, a dye maker used a contaminated ingredient and stumbled upon a discovery that would change the world. Heinrich Diesbach shared his lab with a brilliant but obsessed scientist named Johann Conrad Dippel, who resorted to grave robbing to pursue his dream of bringing […]
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I have always undervalued vomiting. I hate vomiting. When I say “hate,” I am not using this in our culture’s overused version of the term. I really hate it. So much so that I have only vomited four times in my life: once while experiencing dysentery in Egypt, once when overeating watermelon as a child, […]
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I remember being a small child and my father took me to the Los Angeles Zoo. Having been raised in the suburbs, livestock represented cute accessories to my finished, miniature Lincoln-Log cabins that I would construct. Small plastic sheep and goats would be set within the small green fence that I would make around the […]
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We all love goats. How could you not? Even Abraham Lincoln had pet pair of goats named Nanny and Nanko who used to chew on the White House furniture. Goats are worthy not only of our love but of our admiration as well. Goats hold a number of superpowers, one of them being able to […]
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Terms of Venery In the late Middle Ages, the terms of naming groups of animals rapidly expanded. After all, without Netflix or Twitter, what else do you do in the evening? Let’s create names! The Term of Venery, as they called it, for a group of goats is flock or herd. However, the lesser used […]
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Are goats man’s second best friend? They certainly hold the qualifications. In addition to companionship, they have been providing resources to humans for thousands of years. For at least 15,000 years dogs have supported man emotionally and as a work companion. At some point roughly 5 thousand years later, a Paleolithic man said to himself, […]
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