Caring for the Kids

Pam holding one week old Rain

We are into week two of Alure's newborns and things are going well.  This is Alure's second year of kids, last year she had two girls, this year two boys and one girl.  As a milker last year she was difficult.  She started off being a great mother, letting her kids nurse and when we would bring them all out to the general goat population, she would hover near them, never taking an eye off their whereabouts.  We usually let the new kids have all the milk they want for the first two weeks then separate the kids at night and milk the mother in the morning, leaving some milk for the kids morning feeding.  Alure in the milkstand was a nightmare!  She would scream and lay down, trying to stop me from milking.  Finally I figured out how to milk her - I would tie her back feet to a rope connected to the back of the milk stand and then get up on the stand and hold her body up with my shoulder.  In time she relaxed and I could milk her without the rope.  We were not weighing her milk early in the season, but later when we purchased a scale (in September) she was producing about 3 lbs per day - there is about 8 lbs in a gallon.  Nettle, also a first time milker, was producing double that.

My six year old "little brother" holding his first goat - Windy

This year Alure has decided that she would only nurse two of her kids, rejecting the little girl Windy.  We talked to a goat breeder friend of ours and she said sometimes there is a birth defect of some type and the doe senses it.  Unlike humans, the animal world rejects young that are not normal, and sometimes the doe will pick one that they don't like and reject that one.  "Who knows what goes on in a goat brain!"  I'm hoping there was not a birth defect (we'll see, but I don't see anything yet) - my guess is that she knows she will not have enough milk to raise three kids so she picked one to reject.

Storm and Rain at one week

The first five days I milked Alure and fed Windy a bottle of her mother's milk.  The last two times I milked her I could just get enough milk to fill the bottle - so maybe my theory is correct.  We bought some goat milk replacer from a suppler and this past weekend I started to use that to feed Windy.

Pooh Bear in his favorite spot

We disbud our goats - the removal of the goat horns just as they start to emerge, and yesterday was the day for the two little boys.  We do not want horns on our goats, especially with dairy goats.  Horns can be very beautiful, but they are also very dangerous, to you, your family and other goats. Even if the goat is a pet, and friendly, he/she can accidentally, or on purpose, seriously injure other goats, animals and humans.  We have a friend that decided not to disbud one of her kids and the goat knew she had an advantage over the others, keeping the others away from the feed.  Once the horns grow out there is nothing you can do - if they are to be removed it must be done just as the buds appear.  With Nubian boys it is about day 7, girls about a week later.



The disbudding process is not fun.  I take our kids up to Oak Harbor to a goat farmer and pay him six dollars per goat to do it.  He uses a disbudding iron, red hot, and the kid screams, but recovers quickly.  When I return the kids to the mother, I always re-introduce the kid butt first, the area with the strongest kid smell, so Mother will recognize her kid.  The head of the kid smells like burnt hair.