The short version

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A healthy goat has a shiny coat, bright eyes, a full upright tail, a curious personality, and a big round belly riding on trim legs — with poop like small, hard berries. A sick goat shows you the opposite picture: standing apart from the herd, hunched, rough-coated, tail tucked, ears drooping, maybe with a messy rear or discharge at the eyes or nose. Learn the healthy picture first, and the sick one will jump out at you.

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Step one: learn what healthy looks like

You can't spot wrong until you know right. Here's the healthy picture:

A shiny, slick coat. Not show-ring glossy — just smooth, tight, and bright for the season.

Bright eyes and a curious personality. A healthy goat is nosy. She's watching you, working the gate latch in her mind, shouldering in to see if you brought anything good.

A full, upright tail. Happy goats fly their flags.

A nice round belly. This one surprises new goat owners — that big barrel isn't fat, it's a healthy, full rumen with a thriving microbial community doing the magic of turning plants into milk. We love a goat with a wide barrel on stick legs. Joel Salatin calls this those good 1950s genetics; we call it deep-bodied. That body capacity is a working rumen plus plenty of room for growing babies.

Berry poop. Small, hard pellets, similar to rabbit poop. It shouldn't be clumpy or wet. Honestly, poop is one of the fastest health reads on the whole farm — it changes before almost anything else does.

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Step two: the sick-goat picture

Sick goats separate themselves. The goat standing off to the side, away from the herd — or parked facing a wall — is the first one to go look at. Herd animals don't choose solitude when they feel good.

From there, the signs stack up: a hunched posture. Grinding teeth — one of the earliest tells that something is amiss, and easy to miss if you're not listening for it. Rough, long, unthrifty hair instead of that slick coat. Tail tucked down instead of flying. Drooping ears. Evidence of diarrhea on the rear. Discharge from the eyes or nose.

No single one of these is a diagnosis. But a goat showing two or three of them at once is telling you something, and she's telling you now — not next week. That's when the thermometer comes out.

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Step three: put your hands on her

If the glance raised a flag, temp her first. A normal goat temperature runs roughly 101.5–103.5°F; above that and you're dealing with a fever, which changes the conversation from "watch her" to "act today." It's a thirty-second check and it's the difference between guessing and knowing.

Fluffy winter coats hide a lot, so don't trust your eyes alone on condition, either. Run your hand along her spine and hips. You should be able to feel the spine — but it shouldn't be prominent and poking up. There should be a nice layer of flesh cushioning her bones. That quick check catches the slow slides — the goat quietly losing condition under a pretty coat — that a glance across the pasture never will.

Then check her lower eyelid color — her FAMACHA score. Internal parasites, the barber pole worm specifically, are the number one killer of goats — though pneumonia is trying to take that top spot this season. Barber pole causes anemia, and anemia shows up as a pale eyelid membrane where you want to see healthy pink. Goats evolved as browsers, eating leaves and brush above their shoulders, so they never built the parasite resistance that grazers like sheep and cattle did — which means a goat kept on grass needs your eyes on those eyelids regularly.

One important nuance: a poor FAMACHA score isn't automatically illness, and a single fecal test isn't gospel either — eggs can hatch in the sample within hours and hand you a false low count. Take the eyelid color in with the whole goat.

 

What I actually weigh, every time

When I'm deciding whether a goat needs intervention, I rely more heavily on what I can see for myself than on any single number: FAMACHA score, body condition, coat quality, her general demeanor, the time of year, her milk production, whether she's recently kidded (birth and milk are metabolically expensive — a first freshener after kidding is the classic candidate for a worm load), and how recently the herd's been rotated to fresh ground.

No one signal decides it. The whole picture does. That's the real skill — and it's not a talent, it's just reps. Watch your herd every day when they're well, and you will absolutely know the morning one of them isn't.

 

One note for goat shopping

Everything above applies double when you're buying. A healthy-looking goat in front of you still warrants current bioscreen results, because diseases like CAE, CL, and Johne's can hide behind a shiny coat for years. I cover what to check before money changes hands in the free Dairy Goat Buyer's Checklist — and the full picture, from choosing goats to building a resilient herd, is in my book, 'Homesteading with Dairy Goats'.

 

Your turn: what's the first sign that tips you off when one of your animals is feeling off?

 

Quick answers

What are the signs of a sick goat? Standing apart from the herd or facing a wall, hunched posture, teeth grinding, rough or unthrifty coat, tucked tail, drooping ears, diarrhea, and discharge from the eyes or nose. Two or more together mean take a closer look — and a temperature — today.

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What is a normal temperature for a goat? Roughly 101.5–103.5°F. Higher than that indicates a fever and means it's time to act, not watch.

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What does a healthy goat look like? Shiny slick coat, bright eyes, full upright tail, curious personality, a big round belly (a full, working rumen), and small, firm berry-like droppings.

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How do I check a goat for worms? Check the lower eyelid color (FAMACHA score) — pale instead of pink suggests anemia from barber pole worm, the number one killer of goats. Weigh it alongside body condition, coat, and demeanor rather than relying on any single test.