I was feeding him milk with buttermilk and evaporated milk. The vet told me not to feed that and out him on milk replacer. They gave him a cdt shot today.
He is in distress everytime he eats. He lays down right after eating and does little crys and stretches his back legs forward. He eats well, but he looks like hes in pain after eating. He does these little taps/side to side wobbles with his legs after eating before he finally drops and lays down.
I've never heard of entero.
I cannot imagine why your vet told you to feed replacer. I may not have a lot of degrees after my name, but I do have a LOT of field experience. I raised purebred dairy goats for over 40 years. For many of those years I had a commercial goat dairy and I milked about a hundred does. I can tell you baby kids do just fine on cow milk and calves thrive on goat milk. When I was raising kids and had milk cows, the kids got cow milk and the calves got goat milk. Why? I was on a CAE prevention program, and if I fed goat milk I had to pasteurize it to prevent the transmission of CAE. By feeding the cow milk I didn't have to pasteurize milk. Cows do not carry CAE.
I have raised many hundreds of kids and occasionally I fed milk replacer for economic reasons. From my experience I can tell you this. Some kids do just fine on replacer. Some kids can't tolerate the stuff and that includes the expensive replacers made just for kids. The ones that can't handle replacer may scour, they may not grow well, and some of them just blow up and die. The ones that bloat do so without any warning. Usually if a kid is going to bloat it will do so shortly after feeding. Therefore, I would feed the kids first and then do the rest of the chores in the barn. That way I was there for an emergency. For bloat I just shoved a GasX pill down the affected kid's throat and that took care of the problem. Oldhenlikesdogs has had very good luck with replacer but it turns out the replacer she used and had access to was made from all goat milk products. If you decide to feed your kid replacer make sure you have GasX on hand.
The milk, buttermilk concoction was formulated by a Boer goat breeder. Boers and mini goats produce milk higher in butterfat than the average dairy goat so that formula is more suitable for them than regular cow milk but all kids seem to do well on it.
From your description, it sounds very much like your kid may have entero. The crying, stretching the legs etc. are typical symptoms. CD/T does a lot to prevent entero but it is not a cure. For that you need clostridium perfingens antitoxin. If a kid has entero it will show great improvement within 20 minutes or so after receiving the antitoxin. I am very familiar with entero because it was so deadly and so common where I lived that if a goat seemed off we gave it a dose of antitoxin before we worried about what else was wrong with it. A state vet once told me he thought the reason if was so prevalent in that area was because of the pH of the soil. It isn't nearly as prevalent in other areas of the country, and a lot of vets simply don't recognize it. If it was my kid I would put it on a course of penicillin because clostridium perfingens is susceptible to penicillin. At any rate it can't hurt.
Sorry for the long winded response. I sometimes (usually) do not know when to shut up. As for your kid, you will have to do what you think is right. I do hope everything turns out well. For many reasons I miss not having livestock, but the stress and worry of dealing with sick animals is not one of them.
