Proactive, Not Reactive: A Show Livestock Health Protocol That Actually Works

There's a phrase Sam Silvers picked up from Dr. Chris Cassady, head of tech support at BioZyme who works primarily in the cattle world: be proactive, not reactive.

It sounds simple. In practice, most show families get it exactly backwards. They buy a good animal, bring it home, cross their fingers, and start treating problems after they show up. By the time they're chasing cocci or respiratory illness, they're already behind — and in a show season with a fixed calendar, behind is hard to recover from.

Episode 4 of the Drench Line podcast goes deep on what a real prevention-first health protocol looks like for show sheep and goats. This isn't a generic overview. Logan Newsom and Sam Silvers are active breeders and producers who run these protocols on their own animals. Here's what they actually do.

The Foundation: Why Arrival Is the Highest-Risk Window

Show animals get moved. That's the nature of the business — they're bought at sales, transported across the state or country, dropped into new pens with new dirt and new pen mates, often right after weaning. Every one of those transitions carries a stress load, and stress is where health problems start.

Respiratory illness, coccidiosis, internal parasites — all of them hit harder when the immune system is working overtime to handle the stress of a new environment. Logan describes it plainly: you've taken an animal out of the only home it's known, put it in a trailer, driven it somewhere new, and asked it to figure out a new pen, new water, new feed, and new animals all at once. The animal that stays healthy through that window is the one whose owner was thinking about it before it ever came off the trailer.

That's what proactive means. Not more products. Better timing.

CD&T: The One You Can't Skip

If there's one vaccination that has no debate around it in the show sheep and goat world, it's CD&T. It covers Clostridium perfringens types C and D — bacteria responsible for enterotoxemia — plus tetanus. Your breeder almost certainly gave a primary series and a booster before the sale. Give another booster when the animal gets home.

Logan's reasoning is practical: Clostridium perfringens lives in soil. New dirt means new exposure. A CD&T booster on arrival costs almost nothing and closes a door that has no business being open.

The other reason to take CD&T seriously is what happens when you don't. Logan is direct about it: there's no "I think they might have CD&T." They're either fine or they're dead. It comes on fast and it's not something you can treat after the fact. The window to prevent it is before anything goes wrong.

Logan's current program runs CD&T boosters every 60 to 90 days. His family used to give it monthly — that was a practice passed down from his father. He's moved off that frequency as his protocol evolved, but the core rule hasn't changed: anytime you move an animal to new dirt, give a booster.

Wormers: Rotate or Lose

Show sheep and goats get dewormed more frequently than production animals. That pressure on parasite populations selects for resistance faster than most producers realize. Running the same wormer class every month is a way to make it stop working.

The arrival protocol Logan and Sam both use hits worms from two directions. First, a Dectomax or Ivomec injectable covers internal and external parasites on day one. Within the first few days, they follow that with an oral wormer from a different class — Safeguard, Valbazen, or Cydectin — to catch any internal burden that the injectable missed. From there, they alternate wormer classes monthly.

The external parasite piece matters more than a lot of families think. Heel mites, specifically, are a quiet destroyer of leg wool. Once the hair disappears around the heel and hoof line, it doesn't come back easily. Sam applies Ivomec pour-on directly to the heels by hand — on the stand, rubbed in — for three to four consecutive days on arrival. The cost of missing this early shows up later in the season.

Respiratory: Know Your Environment

Respiratory illness is a constant battle in the Texas Panhandle. Logan describes spring conditions where the temperature can swing 40 degrees in a single day — 95 one afternoon, 37 the next morning. Stressed animals in that kind of weather are working hard just to thermoregulate. Add a new environment, new pen mates, and sometimes long transport miles, and you've got a setup for trouble.

Logan's program has added a nasal respiratory vaccine to address this, especially for animals going through the spring sale season. He uses it on his breeding side too — lambs get it when tails are marked. The right choice for your program depends on your location and what your vet sees in your area. The point isn't to copy one specific product list; it's to not treat respiratory prevention as optional.

What Logan and Sam agree on: prophylactic antibiotics aren't the answer. If the animal looks good and is eating, hold off. You've already given a CD&T shot, an injectable wormer, and possibly a nasal vaccine in the first day or two. That's enough to ask of an animal that's still finding its footing. If ears go down or something looks wrong, jump on it fast. Otherwise, watch and wait before adding an antibiotic into the mix.

Coccidiosis: The One That Fools You

Coccidiosis is the health issue that causes the most frustration in show families, mostly because it doesn't always look like what people expect.

The classic picture is bloody scours and a visibly sick animal. Logan's experience is that the more common version is subtler than that. He calls it low-grade cocci — the animal's eating, it's not scouring, nothing looks obviously wrong, but it's just not thriving. Condition slowly fades. Muscle doesn't build the way it should. You handle it and something feels off. He describes it as almost like wasting away, and says the call he gets most often from buyers goes something like this: "That sheep looked great when I got him. I paid a lot for him. He's just not doing anything."

The first question he asks is always about cocci protocol. And the answer is often some version of "well, he doesn't have scours, so I figured he was fine."

Low-grade cocci doesn't always produce bloody scours. It can just pull quietly on an animal that looks healthy until the season is mostly gone.

Prevention

Sam's prevention foundation is rumensin in the feed. He's clear that it's not labeled for sheep — it is labeled for goats — but it's widely used in show sheep programs across the country, and the reason it's effective is that it can interrupt the coccidiosis life cycle at any stage. Other coccidiostats only hit at a specific point in the cycle. Rumensin works throughout. It's not something you buy separately; it's built into the feed. If you're not sure whether your current feed program includes it, ask your feed supplier or formulator.

Treatment

For active cases or situations where Sam's seen a lot of cocci pressure — wet conditions, recently acquired animals, stressed groups — he runs Corid (amprolium) or sulfadimethoxine through his Dosatron medicator. He describes the Dosatron as a 1:128 ratio inline medicator on the water line, and says it's the best $300 he's spent in the barn. You dose the whole pen through the water rather than chasing individuals. When you pull the medication, you follow it immediately with gut support.

Other options include Toltrazuril, which is compounded and available through vets, combined with vitamin E. Sam mentions this as something that works well but requires a vet relationship to access.

If you're not sure whether cocci is involved in a problem you're watching, run a fecal sample. A stool sample to your local vet is cheap and tells you what the actual load looks like. Logan still does this when something's not right and he can't put his finger on it. Build the vet relationship before you need it urgently.

Gut Health: Between the Treatments

Sam's medicator isn't only running medication. Between treatment cycles, he runs Liquid Boost (BioZyme) — a product with B vitamins, zinc, and biotin — as a consistent gut health and immunity support. He pulses it through the water: a week on, a week off, back again. Any time an animal gets a shot, goes through a stressful event, or comes off a medication, Liquid Boost goes in.

Logan runs Hydro Boost, the BioZyme concentrate, the same way. He's noticed that animals seem to drink more when it's in the water — which matters, because hydration underpins everything else in the health protocol.

The point isn't brand loyalty. The point is that gut health support belongs in your program all the time, not just when something looks wrong. An animal whose gut is in good shape handles stress better, recovers from treatment faster, and converts feed more efficiently. The show season is long. The animals that hold together through summer jackpots and fall fairs and into the spring circuit are the ones whose owners treated gut health as a constant, not a crisis response.

Environment Is Part of the Protocol

You don't need an elaborate setup. Sam grew up fighting rattlesnakes out of the feed room. Logan knows families with championship-laden barns that started in a three-pen lean-to older than everyone in the county. What matters is that it's clean and the air moves.

Dirty, wet conditions are where coccidiosis loads build and respiratory pathogens linger. Sam rakes and sweeps his pens every Sunday. Logan uses shavings in a more closed barn because Panhandle winds would clear them out of an open structure. Neither approach is wrong — they're built around different climates. Both work because the pens stay clean and the air circulates.

If you're getting into show animals and wondering whether you need to build something new before you can compete, the answer is usually no. Clean up what you have, get the airflow right, and put your money into the animal and the program.

The Protocol Is a Starting Point, Not a Prescription

Logan says it directly in Episode 4: talk to your vet. The specific products, frequencies, and combinations that work best are going to vary by region, by operation size, and by what parasites and pathogens are most active where you are. What Logan runs in the Texas Panhandle may need adjustment for someone in the Hill Country or the Southeast.

What doesn't vary: the philosophy. Address the most likely problems before they arrive. Support gut health and immunity as a baseline, not just when things go wrong. Know your animal well enough to recognize when something's off before it becomes an emergency. Build a relationship with a vet who knows small ruminants.

The families that win consistently aren't the ones with the fanciest barn or the most products in the feed room. They're the ones who've built a protocol they actually run, every time, without shortcuts.

Want to go deeper on what happens the week you bring an animal home? Read The First 7 Days: What to Do After You Get Your Show Animal Home — it covers arrival logistics, halter breaking, and building the routine that holds the whole season together.

For the episode that set all of this up — how to find and buy the right animal in the first place — start with Have a Plan: How to Select Your First Show Animal and Survive Your First Live Sale and The Drench Line Guide to Buying a Show Sheep: From Your First Question to Signing the Check.