It got up to 74 degrees this afternoon, but I feel a little
chill creeping in now. It will rain and
get much cooler tonight and the rest of the week may even be colder than normal
for this time of year.
Yesterday was also balmy.
We are having a short-lived “Spring” in January. I raked out the big barn and let some of the
mother goats and babies out of their maternity stalls to get some
exercise. All the mothers and babies in
the Green Barn got to go out into its fenced yard. We are somewhere over thirty kids with some
more still to come. Two were born today
so far. I am glad I was strict on how
long the buck could stay, because I appear to be coping pretty well, despite
the intense management and record keeping.
My husband has been helping out.
Here is something I told him this morning after he made the
mistake of dragging the new mother away from the place where her new kids were
to set her up in a clean stall:
Never try to move the mother goat first. Move the kids to the stall and let her
follow.
She is in a sea of hormones.
Goats, at first, do not identify their kids visually. They use smell and the taste of the
afterbirth they’ve been licking off to establish which kids are theirs – especially
in a herd of any size.
If you pick up a newborn or even a week old goat kid, its
mother becomes confused and searches for it.
She knows who you are but does not look up into your arms for her
baby. If it isn’t on the ground, she
just can’t figure out where it is! So,
let her follow you and search for her kids on the ground in the new stall. This will also have the effect of saving your
back when you are wrestling with a frantic new mother.
When Don dragged the new mother to the new stall, where I
had taken the babies in advance of the struggle, she just ran back to the place
she’d been licking them off. All that
was in her head is that he’d taken her away from her kids! She didn’t even see them there in the newly
prepared stall. I had to talk her down
and make a fuss over the babies to get her to sniff them and calm down from the
trauma of being dragged away. Hopefully,
all is well. They’re certainly making a
good attempt at nursing. If her
colostrum comes in quickly they’ll all be happy and well.
