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Can You Spay A Goat?

As the popularity of organic food is increasing, the popularity of keeping goats is slowly increasing due to a healthy doe goat being able to produce between 2.7 liters to 3.2 liters of milk per day depending on age and feed.

This presents a great source of healthy milk that is packed with vitamins and minerals that also works out cheap to produce too.

With there being a number of people new to keeping goats out there, we have noticed a spike in the number of people asking if you can spay a goat to try and reduce the aggression levels in the goats that they keep.

You can spay a goat but the procedure is very situational and is considered high risk due to goats not doing well with anesthetic and many veterinarians will refuse to spay a goat.

The actual procedure to spay a goat is just as straightforward as with any other animal but the problem is that there is a much higher risk for goats when it comes to the use of anesthetic.

Although there are other options available to control sexual aggression in male goats, the majority of people who are keeping goats tend to keep female goats for their milk production and this is where the problems come in as at the time of writing, spaying is the only real option for a female goat but it is considered too high risk in most cases.

There are a number of chemical treatments being developed with some recently having been released onto the market but these products are not currently available in most countries and are still undergoing testing.

Can You Spay A Goat?

The process of spaying a goat is relatively easy and is not considered to be a difficult procedure but goats can have problems with anesthetic so most veterinarians will not offer the service.

These problems range form seizures, failure to wake up, and complications while under the effects of anesthetic and this generally results in an unacceptable risk to the life of the goat.

Goats can be surprisingly aggressive, especially when in heat with both males and females showing aggressive characteristics so the difficulty in spaying a goat can sometimes present a serious problem.

If you do have a particularly aggressive goat that attacks people then the local courts may order you to have the animal spayed or euthanized due to the goat being considered a risk to the public.

This is one of the very few situations, where a veterinarian may try to spay your goat for you as a high risk of death while being spayed, is considered better than a certain death as the alternative.

The other only real situation where a veterinarian may offer to spay your goat is if there is a complication with the goat’s pregnancy and the veterinarian has to do a caesarean section to try and save the kid and mother goat as the vet is already in there and can usually quickly spay your goat.

Is It Dangerous To Spay A Goat?

Spaying a goat is considered to be a dangerous procedure that does present a large amount of risk and there can be a number of complications during the procedure due to the use of an anesthetic often presenting an unacceptable risk to the goat.

If your goat does survive the spaying procedure but did end up having a seizure while on the table then there is a high chance of long-term health problems too.

There are a number of experimental anesthetic products as well as counter-anesthetics that can help bring animals around after being operated on that are being tested with goats and a number of other animals but it is very early in the testing process at the time of writing this article.

In the future, these may reduce the risk to a goat during the spaying process making it much safer to spay your goats but we feel that this is years if not decades off right now.

We have seen people on social media groups asking about new pioneering surgical technicals that may be able to spay a goat without the use of anesthetic.

Although this may be possible in the future, most of these procedures are still in the early testing process for humans never mind animals and with many of the techniques being laser based, the cost outlay for vets just to be able to spay goats will probably too high for this to be a realistic option.

Should You Spay A Goat?

In most situations, it is not recommended that you spay a goat and if you are having problems with aggression with a particular goat it is recommended that you try to separate it and keep it away from other animals and people.

This should minimize the problems caused by hyper-aggressive goats without having to go through the risk of spaying them.

It seems that the general opinion of the goat-keeping community is also based on not spaying goats due to the high levels of risk associated with it.

As we mentioned above, in the future this may change as new spaying methods and anesthetics are developed but right now, we would recommend against spaying a goat unless your goat is being aggressive to people and other animals and there is absolutely no way to separate them.

Even then though, many veterinarians will simply not offer the service unless there is a legal order in place so you may have a real problem on your hands.

We would never recommend that you follow some of the advice that we have seen on social media for various ways you can spay your goat yourself either.

Although the process is relatively easy for a fully trained veterinarian, the vast majority of our readers do not have the required training to safely carry out the procedure.

Conclusion

That brings our article going over if you can spay a goat or not to an end. We hope that we have been able to help you better understand that spaying a goat is high risk and is not considered as safe of a procedure as it is for other animals. This is why many people within the goat keeping community will not spay their goats and will rather look to keep their aggressive goats separate and away from other people and animals to minimize the number of issues created by their aggression.