Found a nice old livestock/animal husbandry textbook at the thrift store today. 80% of it is about cattle and swine, almost none of it is about goats. It does have a lot of useful information though. I want to know why so many animal diseases are caused and solved through feed and simple management and often the very same disease in humans often does not seem to share the same cause and solution.

For example, in dairy goats, urinary calculi are caused by too much calcium in the feed of a male animal. You generally do not feed a buck or wether goat alfalfa, or if you do, only in small quantities, because they will very likely get urinary calculi and that is more or less a death sentence. To reduce the risk of UC, goat owners feed their male animals ammonium chloride in their feed. Sometimes you can save an animal with ammonium chloride if you catch it quickly enough and are lucky. All of this is standard, common knowledge among goat breeders. Yet men are not warned against excessive calcium intake as adults and as far as I can tell, (too lazy to google for it, but I have done so before) there has not been much interest in feeding ammonium chloride to men who are at risk of getting UC, despite the level of pain and trauma involved. :-/

Yeah, yeah...I know. Medicine does not always translate across species (which is why we test stuff on rodents, and abnormal, albino rodents at that?!). It's just that at least 75% of what afflicts the health of livestock is related to their diet or management and the rest is genetics, trauma, freak occurrences, etc. I also recognize that livestock breeders practice selective breeding and culling, etc, and that humans do not, because that would be morally wrong. We practice these voluntarily on a different, much milder level, but still, the differences cannot be wholly due to genetics.

I have all the respect in the world for modern medicine...after all, this is the girl who wanted to be a doctor sooooo badly for so many years. I guess what I am saying is that I wonder sometimes whether a similar proportion of human illness is due to diet and poor management (lifestyle, upbringing, living conditions, in other words, environmental factors that could be changed). How strange that we know how to optimize the health of the animals we raise for our own food but that we do not manage our own health with the very same principles!