× Looking for minerals and goat supplies? Head over to our shop at GoatCare.com! Bumping. If you haven’t heard of it, it’s when you lift up just in front of a doe’s udder when she’s kidding to determine if there are any more kids. This is generally advised if some time has passed an an owner is questioning whether or not she’s done. I myself am not a fan and don’t do it. Having had my uterus “massaged” after labor by well meaning torturers–I mean, nurses 😂 😂 –I feel like routine manipulation of that area is just not a great idea. In more than a dozen years of kidding, I’ve felt the need once to bump a goat who continued to display symptoms of Read More
Category: Goat Breeding, Kidding & Lactation
Short Cycling in Goats: A Natural Approach to Treatment
× Looking for minerals and goat supplies? Head over to our shop at GoatCare.com! Short cycling is when a doe comes in heat and then comes back in heat a few days later or any interval notably sooner than the normal 21-day cycle. While not all cases are caused by minerals–most are!–my first stop is always iodine in cases of short cycling or in does who cycle normally but don’t settle easily. Wish was a four or so year old doe who had consistently taken 2-3 cycles to successfully settle and when she’d kid, she’d have only one or two kids, down from my normal 3-4 in that line. She had only had one or two does in those years of breeding and was heavy Read More
Non Coercive Milking: A Force Free, Peaceful Milking Process
× 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
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