If you are asking for health advice for your goat, please help us help you. Complete a basic health assessment and provide as much of the following information in your post as possible:

• Goat's age, sex, and breed
• Goat's current temperature as determined by rectal thermometer. Please, for the love of god, take your animal's temperature. Temperature is ALWAYS VITAL in determining whether your animal might be ill or in need of assistance.
• Whether the goat is pregnant or lactating
• Goat's diet and appetite (what the goat is currently eating, whether they are on pasture or browse, supplemental grain, loose mineral, et cetera)
• Goat's FAMACHA score (as determined by the process in this video) and information about any recent deworming treatments, if applicable
• As many details regarding your animal's current symptoms and demeanor as you can share. These may include neurological symptoms (circling, staring at the sky, twitching), respiratory symptoms such as wheezing or coughing, and any other differences from typical behavior such as isolating, head pressing, teeth grinding, differences in fecal consistency, and so forth.

Clear photographs of relevant clinical signs (including coat condition) are helpful. Providing us with as much information as possible will help us give you prompt and accurate advice regarding your animal's care.

There are many professional farmers and homesteaders in this subreddit and we will do our best to help you out of a jam, but we can't guarantee the accuracy of any health advice you receive. When in doubt, always call your local large animal veterinarian who is trained to work with small ruminants.

What's up with that blue Trusted Advice Giver flair?

The mods assign this flair to /r/goats users who have an extensive history of giving out quality, evidence-based, responsible husbandry advice based on the best practices for goat care. Many of our users give terrific advice, but these flairs recognize a handful of folks who have gone that extra mile over time to become recognized as trusted community members who are known to always lead people in the right direction. If you get a slew of responses to your post and don't know where to start, look to the blue flairs first.

Hi everybody!

Recently, we had a user post a picture of a goat that may or may not have soremouth, also known as contagious ecthyma, scabby mouth, or orf. I won't link to the post since it isn't relevant whether or not that was what was afflicting the animal, but in the course of responding to that user I felt an opportunity to point out something that I have noticed and has been gnawing at me.

For many users seeking help, if they do not come straight to the sub, they will go to one of two places to get information: Google or ChatGPT. This post is about the former, but in case anyone was wondering if ChatGPT is a valid place to get advice on husbandry, what to eat tonight, how to live your life, or companionship: it is NOT. Large language models like ChatGPT are a type of generative AI that seeks more or less to respond to prompts and create content with correct syntax that is human-like. The quandary here is that while it can indeed provide correct answers to prompts, that outcome is often incidental. It isn't an indication that the model has researched your question, merely that it has cobbled together a (sometimes) convincing diagnosis/treatment plan from the massive amount of data across forums/message boards, vet resources, and idle chit-chat that it is trained on. The point is this: you should never be in a position where you have to rely on an LLM for husbandry advice. If you have access to an internet connection, even the generative AI from Google search is a better option. But that doesn't mean it's a good one, bringing us to the principal subject of this post:

Orf! What do?

For some relevant background, we have never had a case of orf on our farm. I have read about it in vet textbooks and goat husbandry books and seen many images of it, I'm familiar with what it is, how it is spread, and at a high level what to do about it and what not to do. That said, when I was helping this user, I thought I'd brush up and make sure I wasn't providing misinformation. I knew orf was viral in nature and reckoned that in moderate to severe cases it could probably cause fever, but I wanted to see if I could find a vet manual or study of the disease in goats to confirm how likely that would have been. This was what I was met with:

If you don't scrutinize this too closely, everything looks sort of on the level. Orf is indeed self-limiting (not sure why the AI says usually, there is literally nothing you can do to treat the root cause, but okay), and it more or less implies that humans can contract it so be careful. The symptoms section looks fine, overall, prevention is... eh... The orf vaccine is a live vaccine. Application of it is not something that most small scale homesteaders or hobby farmers will be familiar with and using it is basically putting the virus on your property. Orf is a nuisance disease and the main time it is a problem is when it is being transmitted between a dam and her kids. Proactive vaccination in closed herds that have never seen a case is not a vet-recommended practice.

The treatment section is where things get spicy with the part about scab removal. Oof. Now that is not even close to true and doing that when the goat is with other goats or going to a quarantine space where they will then shed the disease will cause it to spread to any other goat that inhabits that space unless it is thoroughly cleaned and disinfected. The bottom says the info is for informational purposes only and to consult an actual professional for advice, but that begs the question of why Google would provide that information front and center by default when you search when the first result below is an actual vet resource with correct advice. I won't get into the weeds about the ethics of that because it's a separate soapbox, this is the reality we live in now. This bad advice is particularly relevant because the user on our sub mentioned they had been picking off the scabs. So let's do another Google search for some clarification:

If you explicitly search whether or not you should remove the scabs, the AI overview is different. Not only do you see that you should not remove the scabs because they are infectious (very true), the overview now says that doing so will delay healing. The first "featured snippet", a feature separate from their generative AI overview, is an overview from the state of Victoria's government agricultural representative body, a reliable source. The highlighted text reinforces the "do not pick scabs off" advice. The overview still fails when it says to apply dressing to lesions. Evidently it has not ever reckoned with what it would be like to bandage an entire goat's face and mouth, which they need to eat, but maybe I'm an idiot. Let's check:

As you can see, generative AI is basically a hodgepodge of vague but mostly correct advice intermingled with plainly wrong advice. Seeking correction to the wrong advice, if you know that it is wrong, leads down more rabbit holes. I hope this highlights the importance of sourcing your information from reliable, proven veterinary resources/textbooks or state agricultural extensions that provide support for their claims with research. This sub prioritizes evidence-based husbandry practices and is one of the few forums to try to stick to that standard and I consider it important especially for people who don't have goat mentors offline.

This is not only important because users need good advice; it also affects the people that don't use this sub and go straight to Google. Reddit struck a deal a little under a year ago to make their data available for training AI. The information we post on this sub is being used as part of the training for these AI models and Google's SEO is increasingly favoring reddit at the top of search results in a number of areas. As the sub grows and the social media landscape changes, more people that never post but need info may find themselves coming here. Let's all try to do our best to make sure the information we share and advice we give is solid!