Dealing with Partial Goat Horns, known as "Scurs"

As a normal course of practice, we always and without exception, disbud all of our goat kids. Disbudding  a very young kid involves burning through the skin and horn bud, stopping the blood supply to the horn buds before the horn really starts to grown. The disbudding process results in the burned area to scab over and eventually fall off, if all goes well. If they do grow back, the partial horns are called scurs.

Scurs are more likely to occur with particular breeds of goats. Alpines in particular are more prone to scurs. Bucks often have more stubborn scurs than does. If scurs, or misshappen horns, start to develop after disbudding, heat up the iron and do the job over again. However, in some cases the scurs are stubborn enough that it becomes a small horn. Here is where you will need to make some judgement calls.

Scurs generally aren't a problem, but keep an eye on them to make sure they don't become large enough to cause entanglement or become a threat to other animals or people.

Unless they grow exceptionally large, scurs aren't usually a big problem. They may cause a lot of bleeding when they break off which can be done more easily than you would suspect.  Some of our does will even damage scurs in their hurry to get onto the milk stand In those cases, just spray the area with Blu-Kote to help prevent infection and keep an eye on it. 

Exceptionally large scurs can lead to standard problems common with horned goats: they can be a danger to humans and other goats. Another problem is that a scur can grow toward the goat's eye. There is a tool called "scur nippers" but because there is blood in the horn, it is not recommended that you try to nip the scur with the exception of the smallest of growths. In some cases you may need to have your veterinarian cut part of it off every so often.