How to Prevent and Treat Goat Lice

This season I have had half a dozen owners – new and seasoned – reach out to me about how to identify, treat and prevent goat lice. Based on the volume of calls, I thought it was time for a new post on this hot topic!

If you have yet to deal with these little buggers, the first thing to know is that they are nothing like human lice. The summer after my freshman year in college my mother got me a job at a day camp for elementary school children. I will never forget checking heads during a lice outbreak and seeing those little things scatter when you separated a child’s hair. Eeewww.

Goat lice don’t move very quickly and they are significantly smaller than human lice (see photo for demonstration as compared to the average fingernail). Just about every year I get a call from a newer owner complaining that their goat’s coat is not coming is as usual and they are seeing some flaky skin. Note that flaky skin can have a lot of causes, but if you couple that with a dull coat that is straighter or sparser than normal, likely you are dealing with lice. You can also sometimes spot lice because a goat is scratching more than normal – dragging itself along a fence or wall and biting at its own coat a bit too often.

Lice are so small that they are difficult to focus on with the average camera. You can see how this one has a distinct head and body and is smaller than the tip of my nail.

Here's the thing, though, by the time you are seeing significant signs of lice in a goat, they’ve probably been there for a while hiding under the fleece, multiplying and slowing destroying your precious fiber. They’ve also likely spread to other goats in your herd.

For that reason, I check all my goats for lice at least monthly. I also check and trim hooves and check eyelids for any sign of anemia. To check for lice, I recommend a pair of reading glasses, even if you don’t need them for reading, and a headlamp, even during daylight. I use glasses that are just a bit stronger than my actual reading glasses. Simply turn on the headlamp and part the fleece along the topline, then in the dent in front of their hip bone and just above the armpit. If you see any suspects, I recommend carefully pulling them from the fleece and setting them as I did in the photo on your fingernail. You can confirm it is lice if you see (with the glasses) a distinct head and body. It will likely be wiggling just a tiny bit on your nail. 

If you had to work really hard to find one and did, you caught it early. If you part the fleece and can immediately see several, it’s a more advanced case. They seem to have stages of maturity and get darker and larger as they mature. 

So now what? A few years ago most of the breeders I know, and most vets, started using an insecticide pour on called CyLence to treat lice and reduce flies. It’s great – affordable, not too hard on the skin, and you can use it on small kids and pregnant does. You will use 1 cc per 25 pounds poured on to the topline. Don’t underdose. Repeat in 2-3 weeks. Seems simple enough, right? Well, there’s a catch.

If you have a more severe case of lice, and/or if it is winter time and your goat has a whole lot of fleece on, I have found that CyLence simply doesn’t kill them all. The more sure thing is to use Ivermectin pour on at 3x the cattle dose. Repeat in 2 weeks. The catch here is that the treatment is more expensive, the dose is bigger, and it is likely to cause some irritation and flaking of the skin along the topline where it is poured. Plus, I try not to use Ivermectin or any deworming produce in the first 45 days of gestation.

The other excellent treatment is a thorough bath with Dawn dish soap. It’s antibacterial and anti-bug and effective for all goats. Of course, it’s not practical on days when the temperature is below 70 or so. And shearing gets rid of some of the lice and their eggs, though usually not all.

There must have been something about the weather this year, because like the many owners who called, I had three does show up with lice. I keep all of my does together in one pasture, so all 16 had been exposed. The ones set to kid were in the last stages of pregnancy.  Here’s what I did – I treated the three on which I found lice with Ivermectin pour on. Since it was late in gestation, I felt ok about the application. I treated the rest of the doe herd with CyLence to stop the spread. After two weeks, as I was only a couple more weeks from likely shear dates, I sheared each of the goats that had showed signs of lice. It was early March and they were pregnant, so I didn’t want to risk a hose bath. So, I brought buckets of warm water down to the barn and washed each freshly shorn goat with warm water and dawn and blew them dry with my show blower. Then I reapplied the Ivermectin on the three and CyLence on the rest. Why? Because clean, shorn goat skin does a much better job of soaking up the medicine.

Around the same time I cleaned all of my stalls to prep for kidding, removing any bedding that might be harboring the leftovers. I dusted my floors with diatomaceous earth as usual before reapplying bedding pellets. Since then, I haven’t seen any lice in my herd and my fall fleeces have been amazing. 

The other questions owners ask me – especially when feeling a bit grossed out by their first case of lice – is how do I keep this from showing back up?? Where does it come from? 

Where it comes from is a mystery. Vets will tell you it is from exposure to a goat with lice. I can attest to the reality that even without exposure they can just appear, seemingly out of nowhere. No Pygora farm is immune. So how do you keep them from showing back up? My biggest recommendation is to sheer on time. Goats with matting or excessive fleece are more prone to lice. That’s what happened to me this year – I had shorn a goat with a very fast-growing fleece in July and then decided to let her winter over without a late fall sheering. She was ground zero for my cases. Also, when possible, keep your goats clean. I bathe all of my goats during the summer and dry them completely dry. Yes, 24 goats, washed and dried. It’s probably 30 hours of work over the summer. Over winter break, if it isn’t freezing temps, I give them all a blow out to remove as much dust and dirt as possible. And finally, check any new or visiting goats upon arrival before turning them out with your herd or even letting them in your barn. I went to buy a goat once only to discover it has a bad case of lice. I simply did not buy the goat. Had it been July I could have washed it in the driveway before heading to the barn, but it was February, so it was just a no. 

I hope all that helps! If you find yourself with a case of lice, know that we’ve all dealt with it. Don’t beat yourself up. Just treat your herd and get back to growing gorgeous fleece!

** Important foot note: As a reminder, I am not a vet and have no formal vet training. My recommended meds and dosages are only based off of my own research and experience as a fiber farmer.