The Importance of Biosecurity and Protecting Your Goats
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Biosecurity has become a buzzword among livestock owners with the highly pathogenic avian influenza in the news. But what is biosecurity? And what does it look like for your animals? Biosecurity isn’t just the prevention of serious foreign animal diseases, such as foot-and-mouth disease, but encompasses the protection of animals and people from all diseases. An appropriate biosecurity protocol is essential to the health of both you and your animals.
Nutrition and Vaccinations
While biosecurity may bring up thoughts of quarantine and disease testing, the mainstay of disease prevention is quality animal husbandry and a good general herd health plan. Quality nutrition ensures that animals have a healthy innate immune system. Offering quality hay and feed and appropriate supplements and minerals for your area and production level are essential to animal health. An animal’s immune system can be further aided by the addition of acquired immunity through the use of vaccinations. Vaccinating your goat herd to reduce the risk of common environmental pathogens, such as clostridial bacteria, is also part of a biosecurity plan.
Internal and External Parasites
Internal Parasites
Treating animals for internal and external parasites is another part of maintaining herd health and preventing disease transmission. Injudicious deworming for internal parasites puts goats at risk for parasitic resistance to dewormers. For obvious reasons, an uncontrollable internal parasite burden is undesirable. Using FAMACHA scoring and selectively deworming heavily parasitized animals can reduce parasitic resistance to dewormers. Goat owners can also use fecal egg counts and pasture rotation to identify and mitigate internal parasites.
External Parasites
External parasites, such as mites, lice, fleas, mosquitoes, and flies, can also reduce herd health, cause anemia, and transmit other diseases. Utilizing appropriate medications, such as permethrins, to remove these parasites promotes overall herd health.
Recordkeeping
Keeping careful records of the animals within the herd, their preventative medicine schedule, and any disease treatment can ensure quick identification of animals with issues can be identified quickly. Working with your veterinarian and local extension agents to formulate an appropriate herd health plan is at the heart of a good biosecurity plan. Focusing on animal health and welfare basics is key to disease prevention.
Diseases
Biosecurity is more than just quarantining animals or washing hands.
Humans
Though the focus of biosecurity is often on animals, a good biosecurity protocol should also reduce the risk of disease transmission to humans. Small ruminants like goats can serve as a reservoir for several zoonotic diseases. Abortive agents in goats, such as campylobacter and chlamydia, can cause severe illness in at-risk humans. Having protective gear, such as coveralls and gloves — and actually using them — can prevent disease transmission.
Goats
As goat owners, many are familiar with the identification and prevention of insidious diseases within their goat herds. Many diseases, such as caseous lymphadenitis, caprine arthritis encephalitis (CAE), and Johnes disease, can lurk within animals and cause illness and loss of production among a herd. Developing a biosecurity plan can involve assessing a herd for these and similar conditions, as well as monitoring animals for their development. In some herds, zero tolerance for these conditions may be the goal, while testing and culling as clinical signs appear may be more feasible in others. Chronic diseases such as these can contribute to loss of production and poor animal health. Developing a plan to manage these conditions within your current herd is part of a good biosecurity protocol.
Perhaps one of the most well-known factors of biosecurity is protecting a herd from the introduction of new diseases. Many laboratories offer “biosecurity panels” designed to test for contagious diseases in animals coming into a herd. Indeed, establishing a protocol for introducing new animals to a herd is essential in reducing the risk of disease transmission. Careful selection of new animals — assessing for vaccination protocol, origin herd disease status, and deworming protocols of the herd of origin — can ensure that only animals with low disease risk are added.
Establishing a quarantine period — keeping new animals separate from the herd with no contact — can provide time for potential illness to clear, but also gives time to use fecal egg counts and blood testing to prevent the introduction of resistant parasites or certain diseases to the herd.
Equipment
New animals presenting to a herd are not the only source of outside infection. Equipment and people can serve as fomites or carriers of certain diseases. For example, in the case of caseous lymphadenitis, contact with material from within an infected abscess can be carried by shoes or feed buckets and be a source of infection for healthy animals. Establishing protocols for cleaning and disinfecting equipment, both coming onto a farm or moving between pens on a farm, is an important part of good biosecurity.
Effective Biosecurity
- Establish a quality herd health plan to promote healthy and effective immune systems in your herd.
- Only add new animals to the herd with a known background and use disease testing to further reduce the introduction of new illnesses.
- Carefully assess the environment and identify areas where increased cleaning or management is necessary to reduce disease transmission.
- Use personal protective equipment.
- Thoroughly clean equipment such as buckets, bottles, trailers, and feed bunks to minimize disease transmission to other animals and humans.
An appropriate biosecurity protocol is essential to the health of both you and your animals.
Environment
In addition to protecting the animals from disease exposure, appropriate biosecurity protects their environment. This means ensuring that food and water sources are clean and uncontaminated. Conditions like toxoplasmosis can be transferred by cats that contaminate goat feed items. Good biosecurity can be as simple as ensuring that the lid stays on the grain bin and the feed bunk is regularly cleaned.
If you have multiple species of farm animals, this can also involve assessing the risk of disease transmission between animal species. Having poultry share a water source with goats can increase the risk of transmission of avian influenza as well as salmonella and other bacteria. If poultry help manage goat pastures, special considerations should be made to reduce disease risk.
Considerations should also be made for contact with wildlife. Areas with endemic wildlife diseases, such as rabies and brucellosis, need to consider ways to reduce the risk of transmission of these diseases to their herd. This may be as simple as routine vaccination for rabies, whereas brucellosis may require strategies to prevent wildlife access to pastures and pens.
Effective, Not Complicated
Biosecurity doesn’t need to be complicated to be effective. When establishing your herd health program, consulting your extension agent and herd veterinarian can ensure that no gaps are left in the protection of your herd and yourself. While illness can’t always be prevented, a thorough protocol can reduce the risk to you and your herd.
DR. KATIE ESTILL, DVM, is a veterinarian consultant for Goat Journal and Countryside & Small Stock Journal. She works with goats and other large livestock at Desert Trails Veterinary Services in Winnemucca, Nevada.
Originally published in the May 1, 2025 digital issue of Goat Journal
