You’ve built your dream homestead with a variety of animals, and you want to ensure their health and happiness. Fortunately, there are simple and easy ways to implement a natural healthcare regimen for your homestead animals. By taking a few proactive measures, you can ensure you’re doing the best thing possible for your beloved homestead family members.
What is Natural Healthcare when it comes to Homestead Animals
Caring for your Homestead animals is not so different from caring for your own family, and as popular and common as natural remedies for the common cold are you tend to see far fewer natural remedies out there for animals. However, animals can benefit from a natural approach to healthcare just as we humans do. Elements of a natural healthcare approach may include, things like essential oils, herbal remedies, colloidal silver, and other safe and natural solutions.
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Raising goats for milk: A must for Homestead food security
Benefits of a Natural Healthcare Approach
The typical approach to animal care can get quite expensive, antibiotic-heavy, and hard to do for homesteaders who may live in rural areas far from veterinarians who specialize in what homestead animals they may have.
However, on the other hand, using a natural healthcare model for your homestead animals can have many benefits including:
- affordability
- ease of getting items or access to items (not restricted by a veterinarian)
- ability to keep on hand
- ability to grow or produce yourself
- little to no negative side effects
- reduced antibiotic use and or resistance
Homeopathic and Herbal Remedies for Homestead Animals
Herbal remedies for animals have to go back as far as keeping animals does. Mother nature had the original answers and those answers still work today.
Essential Oils
Essential oils are concentrated plant oils that is derived by steam or water distillation of plant matter leaves, wood, petals, buds, flowers, needles, bark, or even roots.
According to Julia Lawless in The Encyclopedia of Essential Oils
” Essential oils have three distinct modes of action with regard to how they inter-relate with the body: Pharmacological, physiological, and psychological. The pharmacological effect is concerned with the chemical changes which take place when an essential oil enters the bloodstream and reacts with hormones, enzymes, etc; the physiological mode is concerned with the way in which an essential oil affects the systems of the body, whether they are sedated or stimulated, etc: the phycological effect takes place when an essence is inhaled and an individual responds to the odor”.
Essential oils as they pertain to homestead animals have proven to be a very effective and even a quick remedy to many problems around our homestead. In fact, essential oils have been my immediate go-to when I have a milk goat that gets mastitis (infection of a milk duct). By using a few common essential oils we can skip the vet office, expensive blood work, and antibiotics from getting in a new mama goats’ milk.
Herbal Remedies
There are many ways that herbs and herbal remedies can be used on homestead animals from herbal deworming to making herbal teas, tinctures, medicinal balls, pills, salves, and more.
- Pumpkin seeds, walnut hulls, thyme, and clove have been known to be powerful anti-parasitic plants for centuries.
- Oregano in many forms (dried herb, tincture, and essential oil) is a very effective antibiotic.
- Many easy-to-grow herbs like rosemary, thyme, oregano, sage, and peppermint can be easily turned into natural and healthy remedies.
Colloidal Silver
Whenever the situation arises that a broadspectrum antibiotic may be needed with homestead animals in almost all cases it is safe to use Colloidal Silver. There are of course many different brands that can be used and even made from a simple silver generator.
Here is one of my favorite brands of Colloidal Silver called Silver Biotics you can even enjoy a 25% discount with this coupon code Upcycle25
Even better is to be able to make your own colloidal silver at home and have an endless supply of this historical “cure-all” for all-around homestead health (people included).
Precautionary Health Care for Your Homestead Animals
As the old saying goes ‘an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure‘. That is to say, it is much better to prevent a need for a natural remedy in the first place. So it is always advised to use preventative measures first, remedies next, and the most dramatic measures for last.
Preventative steps are ensuring clean and sanitary living conditions, proper food and nutrition, as well as supplementing with anything that your area or food sources may lack that the animals need. For us in Kansas, this means supplementing copper and selenium because our soil doesn’t have adequate amounts.
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Essential Oils- The Homesteader’s Best Friend
Taking good care of your homestead animals is, no doubt a very important part of living on a homestead. Natural healthcare remedies are not only beneficial for your animals, but they are also healthy and cost-effective. By following a few of the tips outlined here, you can ensure your homestead animals are happy and healthy and living their best lives.
If you are looking to implement Natural Healthcare for your Homestead animals grab a free copy of my Essential Oils and Homeopathics Quick Reference Guide for any easy-to-use guide for what to use and when.
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Beth is a mother of 6 living on a handful of acres in an old farmhouse in central Kansas. Beth has a background in the military and health and fitness however her passions come from her homestead life. Beth is an enthusiastic homeschooling mom, avid organic gardener, chicken & goat wrangler, who is obsessed with herbs and natural remedies and maintaining an all-around Do-It-Yourself lifestyle. Beth loves to share all she has learned about and sustainable living. While striving for a healthy, natural life, family-centered life.