If you think your goat is not acting like itself, one of the first things you do is take its temperature. \u00a0Unfortunately, a goat doesn\u2019t let you rest a thermometer under its tongue until the beep. \u00a0So, the only way to take the temperature of a goat is to lift up the tail with one hand and slide the tip of the thermometer into its rectum with the other. \u00a0Thankfully, my husband does plenty of rectal temperatures on people in the ER so off he went to the barn with a thermometer in hand when our goat seemed under the weather late one evening. \u00a0He returned shortly after with a worried look on his face. \u00a0\u201c103.7, she\u2019s sick,\u201d he reported confidently. \u00a0For some reason, at that moment, I had a flashback\u00a0to when one of our children was very sick with a temperature of 103 degrees F in the middle of the night and how we had flipped out \u2013 it’s a scary moment when your husband who is an ER doctor says we need to get to the ER. \u00a0I was thinking of that memory as he opened the refrigerator and read the labels of the bottles on the top shelf of the door where we store all the vaccines and medicines that help keep our animals healthy and happy. \u00a0Our sick goat was pregnant with twins so her babies were on our minds too. \u00a0He finally found the right antibiotic that could be safely used for pregnant does and gave her the first dose that evening. \u00a0Her fever didn\u2019t break the next day. \u00a0My husband and I were worried about mama goat, our kids by that time were worried about the unborn baby goats, even the goat herself looked wary of all of this extra attention. \u00a0Early the next morning before he went in to work for his scheduled ER shift, he upped the cc\u2019s of the antibiotic and injected her again after the thermometer gave the reading of 103.5 degrees F. \u00a0My husband is always subjecting his poor colleagues to his re-tellings of all the daily happenings on the franch \u2013 so, after one of his fellow doctors overheard the tale of the sick goat, he had said matter-of-factly, \u201cMaybe that\u2019s the normal temperature of a goat.\u201d \u00a0My husband pretended to take offense, and gave him a hard time, \u201cDon\u2019t you tell me about my business of farming.\u201d \u00a0But, my husband grew up with only cows and the occasional horse on his family farm and he learned only about treating people in medical school. \u00a0A temperature of 103.7 degrees F is indeed considered a fever for cows and people. \u00a0But, he had to admit that he had never treated a goat with a fever before. \u00a0So, he quietly asked Siri, \u201cWhat\u2019s the normal temperature of a goat?\u201d \u00a0In less than 2 seconds, Siri responded, \u201cThe answer is about 104 degrees Fahrenheit.\u201d \u00a0Our goat wasn’t so sick after all.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
If you think your goat is not acting like itself, one of the first things you do is take its temperature. \u00a0Unfortunately, a goat doesn\u2019t let you rest a thermometer under its tongue until the beep. \u00a0So, the only way to take the temperature of a goat is to lift up the tail with one […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"sfsi_plus_gutenberg_text_before_share":"","sfsi_plus_gutenberg_show_text_before_share":"","sfsi_plus_gutenberg_icon_type":"","sfsi_plus_gutenberg_icon_alignemt":"","sfsi_plus_gutenburg_max_per_row":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1066","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","post-preview"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/franchlife.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1066","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/franchlife.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/franchlife.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/franchlife.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/franchlife.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1066"}],"version-history":[{"count":17,"href":"https:\/\/franchlife.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1066\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1084,"href":"https:\/\/franchlife.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1066\/revisions\/1084"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/franchlife.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1066"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/franchlife.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1066"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/franchlife.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1066"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}