Goat dermatology!

Yeah buddy, goat dermatology! We were finishing up our day of dermatology on Thursday and were about to begin what would have, without a doubt, been a riveting lecture about antibiotics when the vet received a phone call.  The vet students and I heard some key words: "barn", "goat", "non-pruritic" and, perhaps my favorite word of the entire conversation...consult. SCORE! We're going to see the goat!

We get down to the barn and we find this goat, this poor miserable goat.  The kid is emaciated despite a hearty appetite due to his diarrhea issue.  His hair coat is awful and his skin is equally bad.  He has bilateral (on both sides) bald patches along the top of his back leaving a little mohawk strip of hair on top of his spine. He also had  a few other bald patches here and there.  The skin on his back peeled off of him kind of like dried paint with a tad more flexibility to it.  Based on the condition of his skin, we thought it maybe dermatophilus, which is actually caused by a bacteria.  But, considering the symmetrical alopecia (hair loss) we had to consider a metabolic issue.  The reason that the symmetrical alopecia was a concern is that it's not something that the animal could have done  just by rubbing up against a fence to get to his itchy spot.  Also, the large animal vet said that the animal presented as non-pruritic (remember, pruritic= itchy) so he wouldn't be trying to take care of a persistent itchy back anyway.  However, to cover our bases, we took all kinds of samples and made our usual slides in addition to a few of some hair clumps.  We took it all back to the lab to check things out, although we were pretty sure we weren't going to find much due to the symptoms we had observed.  We were checking out slides, not finding stuff, not finding stuff, boooooooring.  Then one of the students is looking at one of the hair clump slides and she sees something and has the vet look at it.  He looks at it and thinks it's nits, little baby lice! COOOOOOOL! Ok so the vet went back out to the barn to get some tape preps from the goat and sent us all home for the day.

I come in today and the student who had originally seen the little lice babies tracked me down and showed me the tape prep slides and THIS is what I saw:

Ewwwwwwcoooooooooolewwwwwwwawesome! Now, this kid and his friends were not the cause of the goat's issues, we aren't sure exactly what is just yet, but it's not often that you get to see goat lice in a small animal hospital! Fun times people, fun fun times.

Next week is my second attempt at a Sports Medicine rotation. I'm pumped for it, variety is the spice of life right??