cancer in goats

[Sanhestar]

in regard to our discussion about CAE where I mentioned cancer in goats I thought that I post the cancer cases I wrote down over the years. I started to collect cases in 2008 after the first of our goats dying of cancer (proven).

The mentioned goats are all from packgoat owner and therefore not representative for the whole goat population. There might be more cases "out there" of which I'm not aware.

[Nanno]

Very interesting. I wonder what sort of things cause cancer in goats? Did you ever come to any conclusions?

[Sanhestar]

not so far. I've had the same talk with a vet at the university that treated all of our cancer goats because it struck me as odd that out of all the goats we had three died of cancer.

Maybe age (if you look at the list it's mostly older goats) and in meat and dairy goats it's rarer because many don't reach a higher age. Maybe castration as in dogs = newer studies show that castrated dogs are more likely to develop certain types of aggressive tumors.

[Nanno]

Hmm... so many of them don't seem that old to me though. Most of them seem to be in the 6-9 years range, which seems more middle aged to me. Only a few were over 10 years. Around here a lot of dairy goats live into their teens, but most of them are females. It would be interesting if wethering had something to do with cancer rates. I wonder if age of castration may even make a difference.

[Sanhestar]

found this article

http://chem.usu.edu/leochen/htm/research...ar-imaging

it covers a completely different topic but on sentence is interesting
"It has been known that goats develop skin, adrenal cortex, breast and other types of cancers."

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and then there's this

http://vet.sagepub.com/content/50/4/668.abstract