× Looking for minerals and goat supplies? Head over to our shop at GoatCare.com! I used to do all the tricks you hear about to force my goats to do what I wanted. Coming from a cattle background, the entire process of “working cows” is nothing but trauma for the animal and it took a while to learn a different way. Now, I cringe when I read people advising hobbling, tying, or other force measures to milk a goat. I did those things too, until I learned how to do it differently in a way that requires no head gates, no locking or forcing (energetically it’s not much different than rape, is it?), just free will. Instead of looking at it as a battle of Read More
Category: Goat Breeding, Kidding & Lactation
Are My Kids Getting Enough to Eat?
× Looking for minerals and goat supplies? Head over to our shop at GoatCare.com! One of the most commonly asked questions during kidding season is, “Are my kids getting enough to eat?” While it may seem as though they aren’t getting enough time nursing, the odds that they’re underfed if mom is nursing at all are very slim. Goat kids nurse frequently and sometimes for mere seconds. It is common to think that mom is “weaning” or “rejecting” kids because she walks away so quickly after they latch. In actuality, mom is very wise and knows exactly how much to let her kids eat. You’ll notice at certain times she will stand longer and let them have their fill, but most feedings are tightly measured. Read More
Nigerian Dwarf Bottle Feeding Schedule
× Looking for minerals and goat supplies? Head over to our shop at GoatCare.com! Even if you dam raise your kids, it’s inevitable that you’ll wind up with a bottle baby at some point. Our does have large litters, as many as five at a time, and it isn’t uncommon that we end up with one or two (or three) per year that are put on the bottle. This is the feeding schedule we use for our Nigerian Dwarf bottle babies; you can approximately double the amounts and use this for standard sized goats as well. Minis would be somewhere in between. So much of feeding bottle babies is intuition and individual decisions. I’ve tried to pinpoint specific weights to give you an idea of Read More
What to Have on Hand for Kidding in a Holistic Herd
× Looking for minerals and goat supplies? Head over to our shop at GoatCare.com! One of the most asked questions in my goat group, second to “should I vaccinate my goats?” (my thoughts here) is about what to have on hand for kidding. I rarely answer with my own list, simply because it’s a little…underwhelming. Having embraced a “less is more” approach in my holistic goat management, I really don’t keep much on hand specifically for kidding and there’s very little I do in terms of intervention. I realize though that this, too, is a useful thing to talk about even if it doesn’t directly answer the question. So in this article, I’ll do my best to go over what I do have on hand Read More
Caring for Chilled or Rejected Kids
× Looking for minerals and goat supplies? Head over to our shop at GoatCare.com! If you raise goats, having a chilled and/or rejected kid is somewhat inevitable. We select carefully for good mothering ability, but still wind up with 1-2 bottle kids every year in our 30-50 kid crop. While the inclination seems to be to bring these kids inside and raise them up, it can create a host of problems down the road. House raised kids are psychologically completely different than kids raised with the herd. If your goal is tightly bonded house pets that feel like a part of the family, raising them indoors can make sense, but if your eventual goal is that they will be living full time outside with other Read More