How to Care For Bottle Fed Baby Goat Kids

Sometimes a doe (mother goat) has more kids than she can care for, other times she dies while giving birth or shortly there after, or she may just reject one of her kids. Either way the result is a kid that must be raised by hand.  These are often called bottle baby kids, or bummers.

When a doe is overwhelmed with her kids, not feeding them all, or does not have enough milk, one or more of them will start to look poorly, typically standing hunched up and generally not thriving.  If a doe is not producing enough milk, but is not being aggressive against the youngster, the kid may be left with the doe and will require bottle feeding. If she is being mean to the kid, it should be removed and treated as an orphan.

Bottle feeding kids is hard work. Ideally family members can take turns caring for the little one, as this will help everyone not become too overwhelmed. Bottle feeding will be especially difficult if you have more than one kid to care for.  Some farmers will give these kids away, or sell them, rather than do the work themselves.

If the doe has died and the kid is newborn, dry it off and keep it warm. In most cases this may mean bringing it into your home. Goats, and especially baby goats, need to be kept warm, you can leave them in a small pen in your barn, but will be making several trips out so this may be inconvenient.  A temporary pen, such as a dog pen, may be used to contain young goats in the house.

How To Bottle Feed Baby Goats

The most important thing, is to ensure the kid received, or receives, Colostrum, which is the mother's first milk. Colostrum contains the first antibodies and the kid should get some within the first 18 hours after birth. It does not have to be their first drink.

Colostrum can be obtained by milking the doe, by milking another doe who has also just given birth, or by purchase. If you have several does, you might want to purchase Colostrum before hand and store it.

Colostrum may be purchased from a Veterinarian, Veterinarian supply store, or a livestock feed store. It may come frozen or powdered. In an emergency powdered calf colostrum is acceptable. Colostrum can be fed by gently squirting it into the kids mouth with a syringe or by using a bottle with a small nipple. Use caution, if you go too fast you risk it entering their lungs.

You will also need to purchase proper kid/goat milk replacement formula. This is a powder that comes in large bags, and can purchased at livestock feed stores. Do not use cow milk for human consumption. If goat milk is unavailable look elsewhere, or get lamb, or calf, milk replacer. You can also buy bottles and nipples from the livestock feed store. Most young goats like the kind of nipple that attaches to 750ml pop bottles.

Larger breeds may prefer a larger nipple. If you don't have a bottle and nipple on hand, use a syringe or even a turkey baster at first. If you need emergency formula, as the case where it is late and stores are closed, you can use canned evaporated milk, adding a wee bit of molasses to give the kid extra energy.

Bottle feeding is tricky at first because the kid will not understand the milk is coming from you. It is their nature to look for a nipple from their mother. Pick up the kid and hold it in one arm. Then use your hand to pry open its mouth and put the nipple in. When using the plastic pop bottles as bottles, you can gently
squeeze some milk into the youngster if it is too weak or confused to suck. After a few days the kid will start to understand what is going on and will be able to drink normally from the bottle while standing. If you have multiple kids you will eventually want to get a system where you can put the bottle in a holder and the kid can drink on its own.

Bottle kids need about 5 oz of milk per pound of weight every day. You can figure this out and then break the feedings down to multiple times per day. In the first 24 hours you will want to feed around the clock, usually every 2 hours in the day, every 3 at night. After one day the kid will be okay over night if you feed as late as possible, and again as early as possible. With the other feedings continue every 3-4 hours throughout the day for the first week. The water used to make the formula should be warm, you can test it on your wrist to make sure it is not too hot.

When it is two or three days old the kid will also want to eat hay and grain. Kid ration is a dry feed that can be offered instead of grain, and contains more nutrition for young goats. This should be offered in small amounts. If the kid is uninterested in eating this, it can be encouraged to do so by actually putting small bits of food into its mouth. Introduce new food slowly so as not to cause an upset tummy which could cause scours.

As the kid gets bigger it will eat bigger meals, but less often. After about 1 week the kid can be bottle fed every 5-6 hours. Reduce this so that at 4 weeks of age it only is feeding twice a day. Of course as the number of feedings are reduced the amount per feeding needs to be increased.

Bottle fed kids grow into friendly adult goats, but in the case of billies (intact males) care should be taken not to allow them to become too friendly or they may be aggressive as adults.

Pictures of My New Friendly Roosters

We just bought three young roosters.  They are Ameraucanas.  Ameraucanas are the ones where the hens lay blue or green eggs.  Our roosters are 11 weeks old, so they are not fully mature.

For the first two days they pretty much stayed in their shelter but by day 3 they were walking around and exploring their enclosure.  We have them in a geodesic dome starplate aviary for now but after they are bonded to the area we will let them out to free range in the yard.

I did not get any good pictures of them on the first days as they stayed in the shelter, but I thought I might get some pictures today.  For a few minutes the sun was out and I gave it a shot, but it would seem the roosters are too friendly and stayed too close to me for me to take a good picture.

Most of my pictures were blurry and totally unusable.  Thank heavens for digital cameras rather than wasting film like in the "old days".  I did get one okay picture, above, but I nearly cut off one rooster's head, and we know chickens are not too keen about having their heads cut off!

I tried for more pictures but mostly got blurry images of them running back and forth in front of the camera.
In fact of the dozen or so pictures only two were not blurry, here is the other.

This is kind of cute as it shows how cute chicken rumps are.  I think a cat walked past the enclosure and got their attention for a moment.

I will try to get more pictures in the next week or so, and of course later when their tail feathers get longer and more showy, by then I am sure they will be out free ranging and eating lots of grass hoppers! 

It is nice that these roosters are friendly, we hope they stay friendly and do not become aggressive.

Is it Time to Sell The Sheep?

My husband and I have been keeping sheep since buying the 10 acre hobby farm.  The sheep are important as they do keep the grass chewed down and as such they prevent it from becoming a fire hazard.  In the fall tall dry grass is a real concern, but equally so are the risks in the spring, in fact a farm near us had a big fire caused by a fire in their burn barrel that got out of control.  As far as I know they lost their house, barn, and garage.

As such getting totally out of sheep is out of the question, but we are toying with the idea of selling all the lambs and the younger ewes and not getting a ram this fall.

This last winter was very hard on me physically.  Not only did we have a ridiculous amount of snow to deal with this winter but my back went out on two occasions and I could hardly move for days.  We lost 4 lambs over the winter, which really was not too bad considering the winter we had.

Mrs Dark Brown Barbado and her lamb

Some of our ewes are getting older, particularly Diamond, who was one of our first ewes, and Mrs Dark Brown Barbado, who we bought at auction very early on.  It is time they got a break from having lambs.
As such what I am thinking is to sell the lambs and the younger ewes, keeping the older ones and just letting them have a "retirement home" more or less.

I will still have to buy hay and oats for them in the winter, and will no longer have the benefit of selling lambs to offset the costs of feeding them, it will will still be some work, but less worry.

So I have the summer ahead to consider what to do with my sheep.  My daughter thinks it would be great to get horses instead, and while I would love horses, they are not exactly cheap.