Out with the old Quarantine Pen

Our old quarantine pen certainly took a lot of battering from Jimmy (our donkey). He used to lean hard against the long star posts and rub himself down.

Apart from Jimmy, the goats worked on the pen from the inside, pushing and climbing the wire until the whole thing looked very sad indeed.

The quarantine pen has been sitting in the field unused for some time, so I started to pull it down today. It is quite a painful job: cutting wire, unbending it, removing wire clips, rolling the chicken wire, removing the star posts … you get the idea. It seems that putting the pen together is so much easier than pulling it apart again.

I want to use the temporary shelters in the quarantine pen as movable shelters for the sheep to use (not that they particularly want shelters).

We still have a need for quarantining animals when they come onto our property. It’s so much better to quarantine an animal when it arrives so that you can observe the animal(s) and catch any illnesses or diseases before they get introduced to your flock. Sometimes it makes good sense to quarantine your animals for a couple of days if you have taken them off the property for something like an agricultural show. If you are moving new animals from another farm onto your property, then the animals should be quarantined for about a month. This gives the animal an opportunity to get introduced to a new feed regime slowly without competition as well as allowing any diseases to run to an observable stage so that you can catch them and treat them. If you can do this here, you are saving your whole flock from catching the disease as well as saving you the cost of treating your whole flock.

I’ll be making a new quarantine pen in much the same way that I built the sheep pen. The only real difference between the quarantine pen and the sheep pen is that the animals in quarantine will need to be kept there for up to a month rather than just a couple of hours (at most) in the sheep pen.

The quarantine pen needs to be large enough and strong enough to keep the animals in for that length of time. It also needs to provide the animals with shelter, food and water. Of course, if you keep goats, you also need to make sure that the animals are kept entertained.

My new quarantine pen needs to have at least 2 separate “cages” and each section, needs to be at least 3m x 3m. That really isn’t a lot of space for a goat, but it is suitable for quarantine and makes sure that, if you get in the pen with the animal, it isn’t too hard to catch them (for injections, etc.). I intend to make the quarantine for 4 animals, that is, 4 three by three meter pens. It is important to make sure that the animals in quarantine are able to see each other but are not able to physically interact.

It is also good to keep each of the pens separate from each other within the quarantine. To this end, a passage of 1m between the pens and between the pen and the rest of the property.

The above plan shows the overall approach to quarantine, an outer fence that keeps the quarantine pens away from the rest of the property, and space between each of the individual “cells” to keep the animals away from each other.

There is enough room around each of the perimeters of the pens so that the animals held in quarantine are able to see each other and communicate.

Ideally, there should also be a way of making sure that the path between the outer gate and the gates to the individual pens can be closed off. This can be achieved by putting up gates in the passages to stop animals from coming into physical contact with each other.

The entire area required for the new quarantine pen is 9m x 9m and will need quite a bit of material to build.

I’m not expecting any new animals on the property for a while yet … but show season is around the corner, so I’m going to need to come up with an interim solution.