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What about selenium? If you're in a deficient area, regular shots of Bo-Se are pretty much required. Some folks do it once a year...some twice...and I've even heard of folks doing it every 2mo with good success. Your vet should be able to offer advice on that, if you don't already have Bo-Se as part of your regimine. I only mention it because of the 'elf shoe' comment...sometimes that's a result of the animal being rocked back too much on its pasterns, which is a classic symptom of Se deficiency.
FWIW, I had one doe that was pretty copper deficient.. She just didn't really partake of the mineral we set out, and it turned out that the mineral we were using at the time wasn't that great anyway....and it didn't help that our management of their mineral SUCKED.. Copper bolusing helped her a bit in the copper department, but not a whole lot.. Again, copper oxide has extremely low bioavailability and, frankly...well, it just hasn't struck me as a very good way to get copper levels up, as weird as that probably sounds.
If I were you, I'd take a good hard look at your over mineral situation. What you want is a loose mineral with a lot of "sulfates" or "chelates" in the ingredient list. If there are a lot of "oxides," it's probably not that great of a mineral mix. Something else that helps A LOT when it comes to encouraging mineral intake is to set out small amounts at a time, and refresh it often.
So many people go buy a bag of cheap mineral from
TSC or wherever, pour quite a bit of it out in a container, and call it good. That's what we did at first because, hey, everybody knows a goat "takes what it needs when it needs it," right? Well, no, they won't. Not necessarily, anyway, and especially not if the mineral has become soiled or soggy or dusty or even just got
old in the container.
Our mineral issues prompted us to switch to a custom blended goat mineral with chelates and sulfates of copper and other minerals, and instead of dumping out a bunch, we put out maybe 1/2lb at a time for the foundation herd of 10 goats.. Sometimes when you put out new mineral, a few of the goats will come over and take, and take, and take, like it's just what they've been waiting for. Other times, everyone totally ignores you and it sits untouched for a day or two then POOF -- you find the container licked clean. I can tell you for a fact, though, that if we let them go more than a day or two with no mineral and then set it out, they fight each other to get at it.
I bought a 50lb sack on 9/8/09..just looked at the date on the receipt. We've had to toss out 10lbs at the absolute most on account of it becoming occasionally soiled, or having to sanitize and refilling containers, etc.. We have maybe 7-8lbs left at this point. So, 10 goats have eaten probably a bit over 500oz of mineral in 90 days, which averages to about 5.5oz/day. Across 10 goats, that's just about 1/2oz per day -- which is just about exactly the rate at which most goat minerals are designed to be consumed.
I shudder to think about how long a bag of mineral used to last, back when we were using crappy mineral and setting out large quantities, free choice...totally mismanaging it.
And, FWIW, we're still not where we need to be in terms of mineral sufficiency in the herd. These problems don't happen overnight, and unfortunately, they don't get fixed overnight....not even with Bo-Se and a copper bolus.
