More Babies!
Originally posted February 25, 2019
Finally!
It seemed to take forever, but the babies have arrived!
Now, some people will disagree, but personally we don’t get to involved with the births of our baby goats. Our thought is that animals have been doing this on their own for eons and we don’t feel there is much reason to interfere. There are a few instances where we would interact with a momma giving birth – for instance, if the temperatures are super cold, we would reach in and dry the babies off so they won’t freeze. In this case, the temperatures were mild. HOWEVER, since this was Nanny’s first freshening, we were worried she may have a problem. For the most part, she was fine – but, she did have her rear-end facing the hill. So, we did get involved enough to catch the baby so it wouldn’t roll down the hill. After that though, I placed the baby in front of her and she immediately turned into the perfect mommy.
Not to be outdone, Darla decided that Nan was getting way to much attention and thought it would be a good idea to have her wee-little-one as well. Darla also only had one precious cutie as well.
So, now we get to name them. I seem to just go with whatever comes to mind at the moment I see them. Even though we weren’t positive of their sex, they looked to be one girl and one boy. We didn’t want to mess with them and upset the mom’s, so I went with my first impression. The names then? Marcie and George.
Now, morning has arrived, and they’ve had some time to get accustomed to their new world – so let’s get up and go check on these babies… wait? What is that? All the sudden we hear a kid crying. As Jeff runs outside to see what the issue is, George has somehow wrapped his leg into the electric fence! He is fine, but we immediately changed his name to Buzz :D
While Jeff was outside, he went to check on Nan and her little bundle Marcie… who turns out is Marcus!
So, we have welcomed into our goat family – Marcus & Buzz
We have decided to bottle feed these two cuties, and it has turned out to be a lot easier than we expected… and just as time consuming as expected. Hoping this will be worth it. We didn’t bottle feed the last two, and wanted to try it this way see if there would be a drastic difference in the temperament as they grow.
As it stands, we are at seven goats… We sold Billy had planned to keep Boyd as our new stud. But, if the temperament of these two turns out to be drastically different then we will likely wether one of these two and stud the other… selling Boyd. We’ll see, but we don’t plan to breed any more goats for a while.
Stayed tuned for the outcome of our experiment and we’ll update everyone on if bottle feeding really does make goats more docile.