Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
watch it closely. A newborn that appears to be very cold also can be suffering from low blood
sugar (hypoglycemia) — shivering, ruffling its fur, and arching its back. Warm the kid and
use a stomach tube to administer at least 25 mg of 5 percent glucose solution. When it appears
to be reviving, feed it 2 ounces of colostrum, using the stomach tube again if necessary. As
soon as it is active, take it back to the barn. If you end up nursing a weak kid in your warm
kitchen, it will probably stay there for the rest of the winter because it will not be able to adapt
to the cold easily when you return it outside.
What to do with the kids
If you kept all the kids born to your does every year, goats would soon overrun you. Roughly
half of all kids are bucks; because one buck can impregnate 50 to 100 does in a season, there
is no need to keep more than one or two adult bucks for your herd. You might want to raise a
few of your best doelings to increase your herd, to sell as dairy stock to other farmers, or raise
your unwanted kids for meat. Inspect your kids after birth. Look for extra teats on the doel-
ings. Double teats or extra teats that are too close to the real teats can interfere with milking.
Bucks that have extra teats should not be used for breeding because they could pass this trait
to their offspring. A doeling that has a small pea-like growth on its vulva is a hermaphrodite
and will be infertile; avoid breeding her mother with the same buck again.
Raising kids is a lot of work and requires extra space and special facilities. Kids are usually
not left with their mothers in a dairy-goat herd because the priority is milk production. If the
kid is left to nurse whenever it wants all day long, there might be no milk for you at milking
time, and there is no way to measure the doe's milk production or even to know if the kid is
getting enough nourishment. The doe needs to become accustomed to the milking routine, and
the kid must become accustomed to being handled. Kids that remain with their mothers might
adamantly resist separation later on and might continue to nurse long after they should have
been weaned. Some goat keepers believe that nursing ruins a milk goat's teats. For this reas-
on, kids in a dairy herd are kept with other kids of the same approximate age and fed from
pans or bottles.
In some cases, kids should be allowed to nurse. If a doe has a tight or congested udder after
giving birth, bring her kid(s) to nurse every few hours for several days to relieve the condi-
tion. Nursing also stretches and enlarges the teats of a first-year doe if they are too small for
the hands of the person milking them.
