Hi everyone, and thank you very much for joining me for this webinar on the common goat field surgical techniques. This is part 1 and it is actually part 2 in a series of 3 webinars for the webinar vet looking at goat surgical techniques, regional anaesthesia, the hows, whys, wheres, and whens. My name's Ben Dustin and I'm the current secretary of the Goat Veterinary Society, and I work in farm animal only practise up in Cumbria.

So what are we going to cover today? We'll very briefly outline the current UK goat population and how the industry is made up, and then we'll very quickly review the subject of our first webinar in the series, which was taking a look at the anaesthetic agents available for goats and the different types of regional anaesthesia that we could use in a field situation. Then we'll move on to look at some of the common field surgical techniques that might be applicable for use by the veterinarian out in the field.

We'll look at the exploratory laparotomy, caesarean sections, replacement of prolapses, whether they be vaginal, cervical, or uterine, and finish off by taking a look at surgical castration in the goat. So first off, the UK goat sector. It is a rising population of goats kept within the UK, still a relatively small population if compared to our other ruminant species, but a steady year on year increase up to around about 111,000 goats within the UK at any one time.

It's likely to be quite an underestimation because a lot of goats we know are kept in very small numbers as pets. Frequently these 1 or 2 backyard goats are not registered with DeA as they should be and so don't appear in any of the census data. The UK goat sector is comprised of three large sections, namely dairy, meat, and fibre, dairy being by far the largest, with around 60,000 dairy goats within the UK, something like 50% to 60% of the total UK national herd.

The herd sizes can vary markedly with an average unit size of around 600, but some of the larger units can have up to 5 to 6000 goats on one holding. The main breeds involved are salons, Toggenbergs, alpines, and all kinds of dairy crosses. The meat section makes up the second largest portion of the industry, and this has been or has seen a rapid growth in numbers over the past decade, something like 17,000 commercial meat goats in the UK at the moment, with the predominant breed being burr or crosses, and a lot now coming out of the dairy industry as surplus.

There's been quite an increasing trend over recent years of young Billy kid meat, with an average kill out range of about 9 months old. The final of the commercial sectors is fibre goats, which has been decreasing in number over the last decade, probably fewer than 5000 true fibre production commercial goats left within the UK and literally only on a handful of commercial units. As mentioned, we'll very briefly revisit the anaesthetic agents that might be applicable for use within goats.

Goats in the UK are derogated as food producing animals, which means that any medicine used within the species must have a maximum residue limit, an MRL set. And unfortunately in the UK, most of the medicines that we have available are actually unlicensed for use in this species, which means we are forced as practitioners to use medicines under the Cascade principles. The Goat Veterinary Society, GVS have produced some cascade requirement guidelines for the clinician.

And these are available on our website, the link for which is there on the screen for you. But it should be borne in mind that there are only about 17 licenced products in total available within the UK. One of those is actually intravenous fluids and water for injection.

We do have a licenced euthanasia drug. We do now have a licenced wormer, but it is an primectin-based wormer, so we must be mindful of the worming choices. And we've also got various different vaccines available licenced for use in the goat.

We do now have a licenced antibiotic. Unfortunately, however, if we're thinking about the responsible use of medicines, it's actually a fluoroquinolone, so it perhaps wouldn't be our first choice antibiotic. When it comes to anaesthetic agents, which was the main focus of webinar one in this series.

We actually don't have that many options. Xylazine, the alpha 2 agonist, would probably be the most commonly used. And it's, it's quite marked in its sedative responses.

Topping up can be quite difficult, and you do need to give the drug quite a long time to work. Side effects can be quite severe, including bradycardia, hypertension, hypoxia, pulmonary edoema, and it wouldn't be a drug to use if you were thinking you had a urolithiasis goat, because it actually increases urinary output. When it comes to local anaesthetics, procaine is the licenced, anaesthetic agent for use in ruminant species, not specifically licenced for use in goats, however, so we will be using it on the cascade.

Local anaesthetic agents in goats do have a relatively low safety margin. So whenever we're using our local anaesthetic agents, it would be advisable to dilute them fifty-fifty with sterile water for injection. The regional anaesthetic techniques commonly used in the field situation for goats have been described in the first webinar and would include things like line block, inverted L or para vertical anaesthesia technique, epidurals, or intravenous regional anaesthesia.

So I'm not going to go into more detail of those here, but they are covered in detail in webinar 1, which is available on the webinar platform for you. So having signposted you to Webinar one in the series looking at the regional anaesthetic agents and techniques which you might be using, we'll move straight on now to look at the common field surgical techniques that we might use in our goats. And the first technique we're going to talk about is an exploratory laparotomy.

Probably one of the most common surgical techniques you'll perform on goats, certainly in a field scenario. The indications really would be for . Exploration of the, of the abdomen.

If there's any unknown cause of disease, distention, and you can't diagnose what's going on, externally, then the next step really is to open up and have a look inside, see if you can work out what's going on. The anaesthetic approach we've talked about in webinar one, but personally I would prefer either a para vertical approach or possibly a line block, particularly if the goat is quite small. So we're keeping our volume of local anaesthetic agent used as low as possible.

And if there is an element of speed required, then probably a line block would be the faster approach to use. Having performed our regional anaesthetic approach, we would surgically clip and prepare the site. Often the area that you're going to incise would be on the flank itself, typically an area caudal to the last rib, below the lumbar processes, but obviously dorsal to the stifle area.

You can make that incision anywhere in that flank region depending on the area of abdomen of interest. In fact, you can even look at doing midline or paramegian approaches. Those would necessitate a different form of regional anaesthetic technique than perhaps a line block or a para vertebral.

My soft tissue incision, I'm going to go through the skin using the scalpel. Once I'm through the scalpel, and once I'm through the skin layer, I actually put the scalpel blade down. Goats carry very little subcutaneous fat, and I find if we're going to use the scalpel on deeper soft tissue layers, you run the risk certainly in some of the dairy breeds which are very thin in comparison to other ruminant species.

You might go through more than one layer at a time and you run the risk of penetrating the abdomen before you're ready to do so. So scalpel blade just for the skin incision. On through the skin, I then use a combination of short sharp scissor cuts and blunt dissection to separate each muscle layer in turn until we get through into the peritoneum and then a quick punch with the scissor tip just to enter the abdominal cavity and equalise the pressures, and then I will insert a sterile gloved finger.

And use that to guard the abdominal contents whilst I enlarge my incision with the scissors to the size that I need to explore the abdomen. Bear in mind when you're within the abdomen and you're exploring the organs and tissue within, if you have any loops of bowel which are distended, they might be quite susceptible to distention pain sensation, and you might find that you get some pain elicited responses from the goat at that point. So handle all abdominal contents extremely carefully and gently, and anything that you touch should be lavaged with some sterile saline.

As you go forward really to make sure that things are kept moist, make sure the sterile saline solution is warmed. If you can identify the source of the problem and correct it, then that's fantastic, and then you can move forward to closure. Some of the things that you will find within the abdomen you won't be able to cure.

I'm thinking here about a sort of a root of misentery torsion and perhaps you will have an area of cyanotic or dead dying gut which cannot be resolved, in which case it's perfectly acceptable that at this stage you would call it time and perform euthanasia of the goat. Assuming we've managed to fix our problem and we can now move to closing, the closure of the wound, I tend to do in 3 layers. The first layer being the peritoneal and transverse muscle.

I then do the internal and external muscle layers together, and then finally skin closure. The muscle layers I'm using a simple continuous suture pattern and skin usually would be brought together in gentle apposition using interrupted cruciate ligatures. Once the wound has been cleaned off, I use, I apply a topical antiseptic spray, which keeps the area clean.

It's quite soothing and also would promote wound healing. And I would request an aftercare progress report in 24 hours, and again in 1 week's time. A variation on the exploratory laparotomy would be caesarean section.

I prefer to do caesarean sections in goats and sheep in the standing animal, and that's for several reasons. The first being restraint. Goats are very unlike our sheep patients in that the more you restrain them, the more they often tend to fight you.

Goats really don't like being turned upside down or led on their side or forced into hind quarters like we might do with our sheep patients. What works quite well with goats is to have a familiar handler, put a neck collar on and have just quiet handler holding the neck whilst you operate from the side. Often I'll have a deck chair for the handler to sit in, and the goat will rest their head quite relaxed, and gently on the handler's knee whilst you can, operate from the side.

Good idea to have some padded knee pads for this so that you, save your knees. So having set yourself up with the goat in the restrained, relaxed position, you can decide on your anaesthetic approach. We've covered that in webinar one as mentioned before.

Often for the sake of speed, I'll be using a line block for my caesarean sections. It might be at this stage that we use any specific medications for caesarean sections, so particularly if you're suspicious of a uterine torsion, then providing some clambuterol would be helpful. We're going to go ahead and surgically clip prepare our surgical incisional site as we would for any other abdominal surgery.

And our incision into the abdomen will be made in the same way as discussed for exploratory laparotomy. Particular care needs to be taken when you're going into the abdomen that the kids can lie very close to the ventral left hand side body wall. So when you actually enter the abdomen, the uterus can be immediately in front of you and you don't want to be penetrating the uterus until you're ready.

My second reason for preferring to do caesarean sections in the standing animal relates to the following slide here. It's actually cleanliness. If your animal is standing up, you're able to manipulate the uterus up to your incisional site and exteriorize it in such a way.

That when you cut in any any contaminants or fluid leakage is likely to fall away out of the abdomen rather than back into the goat when it's led down on its side, as you might find if you were doing a sheep or goat lying down a recumbent surgery. Often when they're standing, you don't need to drape the animal as shown here in the photograph on the right hand side. There's less of a surface area in that vertical standing position to trap dust and and bits and pieces from the surrounding environment as well.

So generally speaking, cleanliness is another good reason to try these in the standing patient. When we've got into the abdomen and we're manipulating the uterus, have a care and thought to how much force and pressure you apply. I've got gloved sterile hands, and I'm going to try and manipulate the uterus, usually by grabbing one of the kid legs up to the incisional site.

I will try and exteriorize as much as as I can of the leg bone. And I'll make my incision into the uterus itself using a guarded caesarean knives. I suspect many of you will be familiar with these.

They're generally sort of a semi-circular plastic device with a spike and a guarded knife at one side, often seem to be green for some reason and you can use the spike at the end of it to penetrate into the uterus and then slip the actual blade within whilst using your fingers to make sure you're missing anyplanomes and guide your knife down the length of a long bone to enable you to exteriorize and deliver the kid or kids. Often, I can find that there's there's not a need to make a second uterine incision. Usually in in multi kid pregnancies, you could deliver both kids through the same incision.

If you do, or if you find that you can't do both kids out of the same incision, it's best to close the first uterine incision completely first. Use your inverting suture technique which we'll talk about in a moment. So it's, it's leak proof and go ahead and find the second kid in the second horn and deliver that through a separate hole if you need to.

Often when you deliver the kids, the umbilical cord will snap quite naturally, and so there's not any need to sort of ligate or worry about anything. If you find that the cord is very well attached or slightly more edematous, to stop it snapping very close to the kid, I would usually apply two forceps and cut between the forceps to avoid and reduce the amount of haemorrhage or possible contamination. The placenta itself usually comes away fairly easily with the kid.

I wouldn't pull it unless the membranes are separating easily and readily. Leave them in situ, and when you affect your uterine closure, just be very careful and sure not to incorporate any of the placental membranes within your uterine closure. The closure itself is an inverting suture pattern and it needs to be leakproof.

Generally something like a cushing is perfectly acceptable. Once you've closed the uterus and it is definitely leakproof. Anything that you you've touched will be lavaged with some warm sterile saline solution.

If there has been any abdominal contamination, if it's just generally uncomplicated clean uterine fluids, a smaller level of abdominal contamination is not going to be the end of the world. If you have got dead kids. Or it's been a little bit more traumatic or the abdomen's been open for an extended period of time, then I would certainly use some of those sterile saline fluids to thoroughly lavage the abdominal contents, remove any blood clots, fibrin acululates, and bits and pieces like that, and pay particular attention to the surface of the uterus where you've made your incision.

By doing this now and taking great care and removing as much as you can, you will greatly reduce the risk of any abdominal adhesions and future infection risks. Once the uterus and the abdomen have been thoroughly taken care of, lavaged, swelled, I will often use the remaining warm, sterile saline solution just to freshen the edges of my abdominal incisional area. So making sure that the the muscle and skin layers to be sewn back together next are clean and free from any kind of blood clots or fibrinoculates.

The skin closure will be made, sorry, the abdominal closure will be made in the same way as described for exploratory laparotomy. So that's a three layer closure, the first layer being the peritoneal and transverse layers, the second layer being the internal and external abdominal oblique muscles, and then finally the skin. And I'm still using the same interrupted cruciate ligatures for the skin, so it's in nice gentle apposition.

Find that heals exceptionally well. Aftercare for caesarean sections in particular, I'll be wanting follow-up analgesia, so pain relief within 48 hours. I would generally use something like a meloxicam, non-steroidal at the time of surgery.

So 48 hour post-op check would be repeating that analgesia and often a 7 day progress report as well. And it might well be that at that point further analgesia is given if necessary. For simple, clean, uncomplicated caesareans, I'm thinking here where you might have been called to do a caesarean on a pygmy goat, for example, just too small, it might not be necessary to use any antibiotics at all.

Often though, we're being called to do caesarean sections on patients which have been kidding for some time, and the risk of infection is markedly greater. Often I'll be prescribing a 3 day antibiotic course, general broad spectrum penicillins are more than appropriate. OK, let's move on.

So vaginal and cervical prolapses are reasonably common in goats and appear in much the way, much the same way as you might expect them to do so in sheep. Uterine prolapses in, in my experience, are reasonably uncommon and usually follow a traumatic birth. Less common after a caesarean section, but when you've persevered with a difficult kidding, a uterine prolapse is often the result at the end.

The indications are clearly if you have vaginal, cervical or uterine tissue that is prolapsed, and the anaesthetic approach will be typically via epidural, so sacrococcygeal, epidural. That process has been described in detail in So I'm not going to go through it in any great detail now. What we'll touch on very briefly on this slide is the preparation of the prolapse tissue.

So frequently, if it's been out for a period of time, it could become quite dematous and swollen, and it might be necessary to try and provide some gentle digital pressure to try and reduce that swelling. The sooner these tissues can be replaced, the better the prognosis and the least likelihood there is of recurrence. Similar thoughts about recurrence rates for vaginal, cervical and uterine prolapses as are commonplace in sheep apply, although frequently we were told at vet school that a uterine prolapse in sheep is unlikely to recur, and that probably is the same with goats, but what you'll find is certainly in the commercial section sectors, it's very unusual to keep any goat who has prolapsed tissue previously, whether it be vaginal, cervical or uterine.

Clean the prolapse tissue thoroughly, usually with a dilute HIPA scrub type solution, so chlorhexidine, remove any obvious contaminations, contaminants, bedding material, things like that. And it's often better and beneficial to remove any kind of detritus from the whole perineal area. Definitely worthwhile having these patients in the standing position.

It will make it much, much easier, plus the goats will typically stand much calmer for the replacement of the prolapsed tissue. Having cleaned off the prolapse tissue, we're ready to replace it. I usually have gloved hands.

And just use very gentle balls of your fingertip type palpation to gently but firmly push the prolapse tissue back in from the edges all the way around, trying to make sure you go all the way around in a circular motion to make sure that tissue is going in evenly at a time. It can be quite tricky to determine, particularly in the uterine prolapse, whether the prolapse tissue has fully inverted when replaced. And to that end, similar to how you might expect to use an empty clean wine bottle in a cow to make sure that uterine horns are fully inverted, I have taken a clean Diet Coke bottle or equivalent, shouldn't probably use trade names and make sure there are no sharp.

Edges to that and just very gently use the bottle base initially just to make sure that the uterine body is fully inverted and then I can swap that around and use the neck of the bottle just to very gently push down each uterine horn to make sure it's as fully inverted as possible. The main reasons for recurrence of prolapses in the first place is actually the failure to fully avert prolapsed tissue back within its normal location. If prolapses continue to recur even after full aversion, then there's something more fundamental going on and possibly the prognosis then is looking more like euthanasia.

After you have replaced the tissue, it's certainly worthwhile considering medications such as oxytocin to try and contract down all the prolapse tissues rapidly, and close down the cervix in particular in the case of the uterine prolapse. And it might well be necessary to put some form of retaining device. I'm not a big fan of the prolapse spoons or harnesses or hurdles.

I find them quite tricky on goats in particular. There isn't the same sort of fleecy coat that you can tie harnesses together, for example, and actually goats do not enjoy having these devices fitted, and they'll do their best to either pull them off or do themselves an injury whilst wearing them. Instead, I find goats tolerate quite well a buona suture, which is effectively a purse string suture.

I'm sure many of you would be familiar with the buona suture and buona needle technique, where essentially a thick nylon tape, usually either 3 or 5 millimetres, is introduced in a purse string nature around either the vval lips or the rectal orifices in the case of a rectal prolapse. Your boona needle is a long straight needle with the eye of the needle at the needle tip, and what you'll do is you'll usually start in the ventral position, ventral midline position of the vulva, for example. You will introduce that needle in that ventral midline position and basically undermine your way all the way around.

The outside of the vulva to push the needle tip out in around the midpoint between the bottom of the rectum and the top of the vulva. So keeping that needle in the subcut tissue away from the muscular ring. Once you've pushed your needle out through the, through the perineal tissue between rectum and vulva, you can then thread your nylon tape through either your 3 millimetre or 5 millimetre nylon tape.

And then making sure that you've got plenty of nylon tape to play with, you'll pull that nylon tape back down through with your needle as you withdraw your boona needle through the ventral midline position from where you started. You'll repeat that procedure on the other side, the opposite side of the vulva. So push.

Your boon and needle back up the other side of the vulva from the ventral midline position to come out and exit between the rectum and vulva dorsally and then you will use the other part of your nylon tape to thread the ivy needle there and then pull back back down through to exit at the ventral midline. Once you have your nylon tape effectively placed subcutaneously around the perimeter of the vulva or the rectum, if you're replacing a rectal prolapse, you can then draw the two ends of the nylon tape together to close in a purse string manner the orifice for which you are closing either the vulva or the rectum. You would leave approximately 2 fingers, width a gap in the vulva and a finger's width gap in the rectum, before tying either a surgical knot or or a bow of some description in your nylon tape.

Try and make the knot as easy as possible to both untie and retie. Often if an animal does start to strain against the boona suture, it is far better to release the suture, allow the prolapsed tissue to come out, to then be fully replaced again by you. Let the animal strain through the buona suture, because if they strain through the buona suture, the prolapse tissues like to be incredibly traumatised, likely to rip, or the valve or lips will rip or the rectal sphincter will rip.

And then of course you're in a, in a far more tricky position to try and rectify the prolapse altogether. Aftercare frequently these are contaminated and dirty sites and will will require some course of antibiotics. Pain relief certainly I will often be using nonsteroidals, meloxicam typically, and I will be repeating that every other day for the duration that the buna suture or the retaining stricture remains in place.

So typically that would be meloxicam, so every 48 hours typically in goats. If everything's progressing well and the animal is not straining against the bua suture and the prolapsed tissue is remaining in situ, after about 5 to 7 days, I will then remove that buona suture altogether and we will see how we're getting on. Very infrequently, if everything has gone well, will they prolapse beyond that point.

And the final common surgical technique we're going to discuss in detail in this webinar is surgical castration. First off though, it's worth noting that there are some very marked differences in the law when it comes to the castration of goats in the UK. So to a similar situation as we have in sheep, goats under 7 days old can be castrated using the rubber ring.

However, when we get to between 7 days and under 2 months old, it changes slightly. So a bodizo or a bloodless castr is still permissible. Anaesthetic is recommended and it should be done by a competent person.

As soon as we get to goat kids over 2 months old, however, The legal method is either an emasculator or surgical castration. Anaesthetic becomes mandatory and it can only then be done by a vet. So no longer a competent person, but a vet-only procedure over 2 months old, and that's a difference from cattle and sheep.

The anaesthetic approaches, for castration, have been touched upon in webinar one, but typically I would be doing surgical castrates in the field under a sacrococcygeal epidural. And this way we keep our local anaesthetic volume very small, and if they are particularly large testicles or older goats, I may infiltrate a very small volume of local anaesthetic and sterile water solution into the spermatic cord as you might do with calves under surgical castration. It should also be borne in mind that goat kids can mature exceptionally quickly and be sexually mature from 3 months of age.

So being alert and aware and discussing this with your clients is important so that castrations can be done at a time that's appropriate before mishaps occur. When it comes to the scrotal preparation, it's fairly minimal. It's usually fairly clean and dry.

If there is visible soiling, it would be worth using a medicated te wipe, for example, just to wipe off any excess or obvious faecal contamination. We won't be clipping any hair that can often lead to clipper rash and superficial skin irritation, which would be detrimental to wound healing. I tend to prefer an open castration technique, so having taken a scalpel blade, I will make a sort of a roughly J-shaped incision starting approximately 1/3 of the way up the lateral aspect of one scrotum, one testes, and extend it all the way down towards the central scrotal rafa.

I'm keeping the testicles firmly displaced ventrally within the scrotal sac as I make this incision by keeping my thumb and finger across the scrotal neck. Once I have a decent skin incision, I'll be able to use digital pressure at the top of the scrotal neck to force the first testes out through the hole that I've just made. I will castrate one side completely before moving on to the second.

Once the testicle is exposed on the first side, I will then incise using my scalpel blade over the tunica. So the photograph here is the currently closed tuica. So the testes has just been exteriorized from the scrotal sac.

You will then use your scalpel blade over the surface of the testes itself to cut the tunica away. The tunica vaginalis is then forced back up into the scrotal neck cleanly with your fingers reflected away, and you can actually break the fibrous attachment at the epididymis with your finger and thumb to reflect it away nicely. Often then, if the animals are relatively small, you could use the effective twist and pull castration method which is exactly the same as you're probably familiar with when you're castrating calves, and that having separated the ligamentous attachment at the base of the scrotum, you can then reflect the tuica away and you can twist the, the cord and the vase together.

Making sure that no additional soft tissue is being entrapped within your twist and you're keeping it twisting, twisting, twisting until you have the cord and the vase, feeling as if it's sort of a tight, tight cord, really a tight string cord. And then using very gentle, steady, traction, you simply pull and snap that away. And the elastic recoil of the vase and the, blood vessels within the cord, enable that to shoot away and affect hemostasis.

If the testes are particularly large or they're older goats, then it's probably safer and more appropriate to use emasculators, in which case you can open the tunica as before, separate the ligament as attachment, and pull sufficiently so that you can get good exposure of the fires in the cord for the emasculators to sit nicely as sight these as cranially as you can without incorporating any additional soft tissue structures or inadvertently the neck of the scrotum. And then you can clamp those shut to cut away the testes and hold onto them clamped shut, for around 2 minutes to affect hemostasis before, relieving these, and these will again, shoot back upside into the spomatic sorry, into the scrotal neck. Usually the complications come from haemorrhage, really, and it depends on the site of the haemorrhage as to how significant these are going to be.

If it's coming from a relatively ventral point, it'll be possible to grasp using some forceps, the bottom of the of the phlegmatic cord, and you'd be able to place a couple of ligatures. 2 is usually sufficient across the bleeding vessel. To create hemostasis.

If you are unable to locate the bleeding stump, it might be necessary to use an external tourniquet around the base of the scrotal neck so as high up against the abdominal wall as you can manage, and this can trap anything which is just out of forcep reach. Clearly if the haemorrhage is internal, so behind the inguinal ring within the abdominal cavity, placing a tourniquet externally around the scrotal neck is going to be ineffective, and at this point it's really going to come down to Value of the animal and how far you want to go because the only other way of trying to affect hemostasis for a bleeding stump within the abdomen would be to go to an exploratory laparotomy and try and locate it from within the abdomen. Aftercare of castrations generally not a lot required.

Obviously we're leaving these wounds open and if we are castrating in fly season, then fly repellent would be extremely worthwhile. We've given anaesthetic agent. I would also give all my castrates additional analgesia in the way of nonsteroidals.

I would be applying the topical antiseptic spray to my incisional wounds to try and aid soothing and natural wound healing, and then ask for good monitoring over the next 24 to 48 hours in particular to ensure we're not going to get any, any delayed haemorrhage. We're not getting any overt swelling, and routine antibiotics would indicated. If we're starting to see evidence of a scrotal infection, for example, so some swellings and stilted gait, the goat itself off colour, then following examination, it might be appropriate to provide some antibiotics, but it certainly would not be routine.

So quickly just to summarise what we've talked about today, we've reiterated the current situation of the UK goat population, which is increasing annually, although it's still a relatively small species in terms of number, just over 111,000. We've looked in a little bit more detail at the surgical approaches to exploratory laparotomy, and then the variant that is the standing caesarean section, which would be my preferred method for caesarean section in goats and also sheep and cattle. We've looked at the replacement of vaginal, cervical, and uterine prolapses.

And finally finished off by discussing surgical castration and the legal differences between castration in lambs and kids. Next time in the 3rd and final webinar in this short series, we'll look at some of the other field surgical techniques which are commonplace in goats, namely the disbudding of goats, the removal of eyes in nucleation, and also digit amputation under an intravenous regional anaesthetic. Hope you can join me then.

As ever, I'd like to put forward the references and the further reading which might be indicated to accompany this webinar series, particularly the Harwood and Mueller book at the top. Goat Medicine and Surgery has some fantastic pictures and some wonderful descriptions of various surgical techniques, so well worth a look if you haven't seen it. John Matthews' Common surgical procedures article in the Goat Veteran Society journal is well worth a read and has plenty of additional information on many of the topics that we've covered over this webinar series.

And finally, just before I let you all go, a quick plug for the Goat Veterinary Society, which, as I'm sure many of you will know, it's a specialist division of the British Veterinary Association. And was formed back in 1979 with the idea really to try and promote interest in and also improve the knowledge of goats within the veterinary profession, but not just veterinary professionals, actually goat keepers and commercial farms as well. And because of that and to effect that end, membership is open to all veterinary surgeons, veterinary students, research fellows, but also farmers, commercial farmers, hobbyists, anybody who has an interest really in goats.

We hold at least one on-farm meeting each year and provide also virtual and online conferences as well. We produce the Goat Veterinary Society Journal, which is distributed to all members and is available on the GVS website as well. If you have any questions at all or you would.

If you like any more information about anything that we've talked about, please don't hesitate to get in touch. I've left my email address there at the bottom, which is the GVS. [email protected].

I'm more than happy to get back to anybody with any questions via email, so please do just get in touch if you wish. And as ever, my thanks to all those who contributed to both this talk and to the Goat Venary Society more generally, particularly past President David Harwood, the current President Nick Perkins, our treasurer Bryony Kendall, and our past president John Matthews. If anybody does have any questions, please do feel free to email me, email me as I've already mentioned.

And otherwise I look forward to seeing you on the 3rd and final webinar in the series looking at other common surgical techniques in the goat, including disbudding, nucleation and digital amputation.