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Tuesday, April 14, 2015

Repurposing

I found a new use for the 4-wheeler cart, baby goat nursery.  Yes, that is a second bottle goat J brought in this evening.  Another nanny was culling one of her triplets. 
Since the bottle goats need to be fed 3-4 times a day for the first few days it is usually easier to have them at the house instead of the barn.  The only problem is that I have never fixed a good pen for them here.  They normally roam around the yard during the day and stay in a 20 gallon tub at night.  Then I noticed the cart that I have been meaning to move to store in the shed but have been tripping over in the garage.  What a perfect solution, until they figure out how to jump out.  But by then it will be time to move them to the barn.
We have now had 8 sets of triplets out of 15 nannies kidding so far.  We only had 10 set out for 42 nannies last year.
To answer a couple of questions from my last goat post,

1- I don't think the nanny goats care much what the babies look like color wise.  There are all sorts of color combinations and I also don't think the nannies know what they look like themselves to try to pick babies that look like them.  (no mirrors out there)

2 - We tried some in the beginning of our goat herding to graft kids onto different mothers or force them to take their own when they had tried to abandon one and met with little to no success.  Goats are a pain to work with like that and for us it is just easier to pick up the strays and feed them.  Sometimes it works out to feed them with the herd and they learn how to steal some on their own.  

Kid count - 34
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2 comments:

  1. CApril 15, 2015 at 7:13 PM

    Thanks for answering the questions. I was wondering about the baby goat color since one of the rejected triplets from the prior post was all brown while the other 2 from the triplets the mother did accept were black and white. That poor little brown one looking back at his family in one picture then balling in the next - seemed so sad.

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  2. Mrs ShoesApril 17, 2015 at 11:46 AM

    2nd the thanks for those of us who have no real clue but just think that the kids are awful sweet.

    Remembering the smell of any adult goats that I've come across though (we used to ride past a herd @ our old place), I wouldn't necessarily call them sweet.
    Queerly maybe, but of the 3 horses I rode @ the time, 1 of them swore to me that the goats gave her the heebie jeebies -- she would tremble, halt, walk backwards, snort, shake her head.. all kinds of protest about walking past the goats. Just in case you wonder, it didn't work, she still had to walk past, but she couldn't do it without the drama. We also rode past farmed buffalo, sheep, elk, and cattle on a regular basis; the others she tolerated but to this day(!) she swears cows are of the devil (damn horse). No goats to walk past here.

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