And I Will Call Her Bunny

Easter Sunday morning, at about 1:30 AM, we took delivery on two brand spanking new baby doelings, delivered by our doe goat, Sparky. In these first couple of days, saanen kids are reminiscent of rabbits, hence this one will be our Easter Bunny. The other is Bender. In Dairy goat naming convention, it's a 'B' year and the rest of the reference is too obscure for most folks.

We had been waiting for Sparky to deliver for a couple of days. It was a nice sunny day on her due date Friday. But she didn't deliver. Friday night was a windstorm with some rain. Saturday it snowed enough to stick. Saturday night was cold and wet. Sunday morning, early, more so.

Here is sparky with a pretty glazed look getting close to labor.


She kept licking us in the face and hands, like she was washing off the after birth. Getting practice for the real event.

In spite of the weather and late delivery, every seems to have turned out OK. Two Doelings, nursing, peeing and pooping. All good sings.

While all this goat delivery was going on, he was tangling with a Skunk. He'll be sleeping outside for the near future even if I wasn't out there sleeping with the kids and new mom.

On of the benefits of sleeping out with the goats, my wife brings me out coffee in the morning..

FINALLY!!!!

Our last doe finally gave up the goat.



We only have three milking does, so some people will look at this and say big deal. But today our last pregnant doe finally kidded. A healthy doeling, thank you very much. It feels like about time, we have been waiting for kidding, kidding, taking care of kidding related crisis and following up with kids for a month and a half. I think that I have slept in my bed in the house three times during that period. I was ready for it to end. And Heddar, the last doe, took her sweet bippy time waiting for pretty much the least convenient moment. It was raining, my wife had left the property and I was trying to get on the road for business. As I was telling myself I needed to jump in the car to go, I checked on her one more time to find her in the midst of a contraction with two hooves and a bubble sticking out. But it turned out OK.

And just to prove kids are unsafe at any speed, the new kid peed on me within 1/2 hour of birth.




All of these photos captured in their wild state by a boy who is not yet four.

A Buck and a Doe

Sparque final shared her secret with us.



Sparque was actually due on the 15th, so we were getting a little antsy to find out what was in store for us. After she was late a couple of days, my wife started reading all the goat books. One of them said call a vet if the goat is more than four days late as the kids can get to big to fit through the birth canal. That wasn't something I wanted to hear so I was glad that on the morning of the 5th day (roughly 12:23 AM) we had both kids out without calling on the services of a vet and very little reachen in. Keeping goats is already expensive, having a vet out for a delivery would pretty much spoil it.

So now we have two new kids to add to this years list, a buckling and a doeling. Alice and Alarm.

All the best laid plans of mice and men

...Are dashed by the relentless flow of nature.

That's Ruffles on top, her daughter Heddar below. They are both pregnant in the picture. Preggers as my wife might say. Ruffles has been ready to pop for a little while. As I alluded to before, I have been sleeping in the goat house for a while. As it turns out, I had the breeding date wrong. I was twelve days early. And it took me ten nights out in the goat house to go re check my notes. I started sleeping out in the goat house again as the new date approached. Another four nights. Mostly in the rain. As of this morning, no mucus plug, no nesting behavior, no braying, nothing. I checked again at about 10:30 AM, again nothing. I went out at just before noon to give the pregnant does their grain snack. From a distance Ruffles looked like she had some pink showing through the leg hair. "Does she have leg mites I didn't notice?" I thought to myself. Then I noticed the umbilical cord hanging down. Hmm, and umbilical cord, I wonder were that came from?....

After all those nights sleeping in the goat house. Mentally preparing myself for "Reachen In". Wondering if I had enough light out there. Trying to schedule my work around this unpredictable event. She went and had the kids without me. Two healthy doelings, just what we wanted. Ruffles is eight and we might only get one more pregnancy from her. She is by far the best producing doe and we were really hoping to have more does from her line. And we really wanted to get more does from her.










The doelings needed a little help finding and holding a teat. It doesn't help that Ruffles has not nursed kids before. In the past, we have always hand raised (bottle fed) Ruffles' kids. Part of the idea is the kids view the person who feeds them as a member of their herd, maybe their mother and are less skittish with them. And the Doe views the one milking them as their kid. Last year, with a different doe, we decided to try allowing the kids to nurse on the doe. We let the kids nurse freely for the first two weeks. After that, we separate the kids from the doe at night to allow her to build up some milk for a morning milking. Then the kids nurse during the day. At about two months, we separate the doe from the kids (which she was ever so grateful for). Allowing the Doe to nurse the Kids gets us off the hook for a lot of midnight feedings. It also gets the doe off the hook for an engorged udder for those first couple weeks where her production demands milking twice a day. I do have to work hard to get a good imprint with the kids since I am not bottle feeding them. I'll still sleep out in the goat house for a few more nights. But that makes it easy to ensure they are getting enough to eat and are staying warm at night. It also means we have to teach ruffles to be a good mother. She's never done it before, and so far, I am not so sure she is interested in learning. Sparky figured it out last year, so I imagine Ruffles will to.
Either that or we move back to the old model for her....

A little later the same day:

Ruffles wasn't real thrilled with this whole motherhood thing. I think I heard her say something about great grandmothers shouldn't have to breast feed. Or put up with infants. Here I am using my arms locked into a peice of stock panel to get her to hold still long enough for the kids to nurse. While I was doing it alone two hours later, I thought to myself, ya right, this is easier than bottle feeding... But the kids will be up and agile soon enough. They'll be running her ragged wanting to nurse.

Update on the Kids

Here are the details about yesterday's kids:
Sparky (Sparque as she prefers it) delivered two bucklings yesterday afternoon at about 2:00 in the afternoon. As Jeff predicted, she waited until the weather turned and it was the most inconvenient moment. It had turned cold and rainy and we were expecting company at the house. I guess she decided that middle of the night wasn't inconvenient enough since I have been sleeping int he goat house since Tuesday anyway.

The delivery went well. Both bucklings came out front hooves followed by noses in diver formation. The first one spent a while coming out and going back in, but the second one didn't fool around. We did get nervous about the after birth. Last year Sparque had a retained placenta and it was unpleasant. We had oxitocin on hand this year and when Sparque hadn't passed the afterbirth two hours after the delivery, I intervened. She passed the after birth shortly after that. The oxitocin triggers the contraction of the uterus. It can also be used to induce delivery. It's possible she would have eventually passed it on her own, but given her history, I was glad to have it.

I did get to try my bounce technique out to check for additional kids after the first. It was quite obvious there was still another body in there, I could feel the hard parts moving around in her belly.

All in all, a good delivery. Nobody died and no reachin' in. The delivery was later than we expected and we were starting to get a little on edge. Last year, she was a day early, so this year we have been prepared since Tuesday and expect it by Thursday. She had gone into a false labor the Thursday prior. It does seem like we got a lot of rare bad experiences out of the way last year with two poor presentations, a retained placenta and a still born. We are hoping we have paid our dues for a while.

We are pretty sure we are done for the season. Our other doe that we bred does not look pregnant. But she still has nearly 1-1/2 months to go if she is, so it is possible.

Whealt, it's been a long day of over due equipment work and I still have to go out and check on the kids...

A promise made is a deed left undone

I promised I would get a blog post up immediately afterward...
they are in reverse order so steel yourself.

Warning Will Rogers....

Extra points for picking out body parts

I was moving in to gently pierce the birth sac when it burst.

I sort of lost my way there

In my previous post I set out to talk about some things I have had to come to terms with since getting dairy goats. And I made a good start on it, the relationship between milk and the fate of the offspring that made the milk possible are an important aspect. But I did get side tracked.

Another aspect of all livestock raising is the element of risk. All us living things are finding new and different ways to end our existence every day. Some are hardier than others, but in general, at it's core, there is a spark of life and if, for even the briefest moment, that light goes out, it can never be lit again. Life is not only precious, it is fragile. Some short story I read, maybe in a college lit class, the author said a chicken can die from a thousand different ailments. I think he may have under estimated.

When we got our dairy goats, they were both in milk. One of them I had been milking part time for a friend for about a year before I bought her and brought her home. The first day we brought the does home, we milked them and had that milk to drink. That spoiled us, I fear. We had an immediate return on our investment and it continued to return for eight more months. Since then I have read a lot more about goats. Many of the descriptions talked about first time goat owners buying a spring kid and raising it up over the summer, getting to breeding weight, finding a buck, sheltering it through the winter and kidding in the spring. Going through all that without getting a drop of milk until the very end. That takes a lot of faith. All the things that could go wrong, even if it didn't extinguish the spark, if it just failed one of those tests, all could be for naught.

I think our first introduction to fear was coming up on kidding. We had read many books and sought advice of experienced handlers. But the anxiety starting about a week before kidding was due was acute. And, as it happens, it was not completely without reason. We had a not so smooth kidding from both goats. Two bad presentations, a still born and a retained placenta. The retained placenta was probably our fault, at least in part. While the first goat was kidding and things weren't going so well, I had enough spare thought to think about where it might lead. If that goat could die in childbirth, well, then the other could too. What would losing one or both goats mean to us? We had invested in our fencing, feed and housing the goats. We had accepted that we were drinking expensive milk in order to gain more control over our food sources. But what if that source were of a sudden not there. And it would put us at least a year back on breeding up a critical mass of our own herd. And if things went wrong on the first try, would we have the fortitude to try again anyway? I'd like to think so, but when I had half a kid sticking out of Our Doe Goat Sparky the wrong way, there was some doubt.

And now, nearly a year further into it, I have found ever more issues to dwell on. Are we doing enough to protect them from parasites? Do we practice enough bio-security to prevent someone else's problem from becoming ours. Are our gates and fences strong enough to keep them in and out of the grain bin? If they did get bloat, would we react soon enough? Will the neighbors dog be a problem. Will the neighbors kid be a problem (I worry more about the kid, by the way). What if we don't spot the heat and miss our breeding window? Does Sparky have scar tissue in her womb from the hard kidding? Can she still conceive? Will we be able to get hay for winter? Did I buy enough? Is the barn dry enough to prevent mold? None of these were worries when I got my milk in a plastic jug at the store in town.

I don't want to discourage anyone from trying their hand at goat herding. It is, in general, a pleasant pastime. It rewards us with sustenance and moments of triumph and joy. Our animals are sweet, even Sparky who complains too much. But it is not without anxiety or dark days. I don't think it is something you can put in a balance scale, though. There is not a beam strong enough to weigh these matters and the pans would never accommodate all the details needing to be weighed.

On Kids, Kidding and Breeding to have kids

We still have one goat milking, we hope she'll milk through. She has milked at least two years per freshening in the past and we hope she will continue.

Having a dairy animal in our family has brought us in touch with what milk means, and it is not an altogether pretty sight. Often people say they couldn't kill to eat meat, but milk has a charismatic image of wholesome goodness, warmth of motherhood. Having dairy animals has brought me closer to the more stark reality that milk requires breeding, and more often than not the resulting prodigy is not an animal that will live to maturity. For the success of the breed, most of that offspring probably should not complete the cycle of life. That means slaughtering kids. And that's the basic equation that becomes obvious after being in the dairy vocation for any amount of time. Milk equals killing kids. We get the doe pregnant in order to take the milk made for the kid for ourselves. And more than likely, we will slaughter that kid and eat him too. Milk has an unseemly side. The knowledge has not slowed our consumption of milk, but it is a sobering reality.

This idea is similar to many that have become lost in our anonymous industrial food system. The element of risk has been removed from the consumer's experience. Consumers never need worry about a failed harvest, weather events that destroy seedlings or an out break of disease in livestock. And just about any unpleasant experience, from washing off dirt to dealing with the slaughtering or butchering. The luxury if specialization has allowed our modern society to make huge gains in productivity. But I think that with the outbreaks of super bacteria and virus bred on a steady diet of low level antibiotics on CAFOs and the changes in our landscape from monoculture agriculture are beginning to make their costs known.

I don't think it is realistic to suggest that the average person should become food independent. But I do think the pendulum has swung too far towards industrial agriculture and anonymous food.

New Kid on the block

We had our first kid today. A difficult but rewarding experience. I know enough to say that the goat did all the work, even though it felt like a lot of effort on our part.



















As far as we can tell, the kid is healthy. He took a bottle of colostrum within an hour of birth.



















Since it is a boy, we'll hope for good confirmation and try him as a pack animal.

It's late and it's been a long evening. Maybe more details at a later time.