One morning while tending to the flock, I noticed that Elf’s head was covered with blood. He had broken his horn and was bleeding from the wound in his head.

Goat’s horns are actually a living part of their skulls. As a part of the skull, the horns contain blood vessels and usually bleed when broken.  A broken horn can cause significant blood loss, and even death in some cases.

Luckily, Elf’s horns had mostly already been removed earlier in his life and he only had a small scur on his head that broke off. It was a small break so while there was a decent amount of blood on his head, the active bleeding had mostly clotted on its own.

I managed to separate Elf partially from the main herd. By the time I got him separated from the others, the bleeding had stopped. I sprayed his head with a veterinarian antiseptic spray called Blu-Kote. The spray helps prevent infections. It also turns everything very blue to help you tell where it has been applied.

As you can see in the below video, Elf’s head is now blue!

Click continue to see more pictures of Elf’s recovery.

As mentioned above, Elf’s head is now blue and purple from the antiseptic spray and the blood from where his horn broke off.

Elf appears to have fully recovered very quickly. He is back to eating hay normally and hasn’t shown any further signs of injury.

Elf eating hay during recovery.

In fact, Elf continued to ram some of the other goats even with his injured head.

Butterbean now has a distinctive blue spot on his side. I didn’t spray Butterbean with any Blu-Kote and Butterbean isn’t naturally blue colored, so Elf must have rammed him while the Blu-Kote was still wet.

Beanie with a blue spot from being rammed by Elf.

We expect them both to make full recoveries.