Goat Life

Who would have thought that raising goats would be so stressful? we decided to start raising goats for the kids 4-H projects. I guess i didn’t realize what all went into raising goats, and being 15 miles away from where they are it makes for a long day it takes 15 mins or less to feed but 30 mins to get out there to them. So this year was my first experience with the breeding and boy was it ummm…something. Yea i love the cute little babies when they are born but going through the whole process is a bit disgusting! most all the babies that were born on our farm this year had to come at the most inconvenient time, during my daughters basketball season and her dad was the coach, also the coldest part of the darn year. I found i’m not to fond of the cold after sitting out there with them until midnight watching a momma and her new born babies to make sure everything was going the way they should. Thank god i didn’t have to do it alone i’m not to sure how i would have handled that. between the help of Zach of course, my sister and my two best friends i made it thought our first kidding season! YAY ME! I used to have a love to for cute little bottle babies, well not so much any more i mean i still love them and ill take care of them but after having 10 i’m kinda over the bottle baby thing, which i think Zach knew what he was doing when we started breeding, he figured if we had a bunch of does there was bound to be a few mommas that couldn’t take care of their kids. He was right unfortunately. some of the bottle babies i had i’m sure could have been avoided but after i saved their little life i wasn’t giving them back to their mom, which is where the second part of this story leads. we will call this the good, the bad, and the ugly. After some of our does had their kids in the freezing cold i might add they were less than perfect mothers but when their having 2 and 3 at a time i kinda can’t blame them in the beginning, but i would thing after resting a while after giving birth you would want to take care of your babies but hey i could be wrong, animals might not thing like us humans . my daughter and i have learned a lot about saving baby goats life and its a super hard lesson to learn after you find out you can’t save them all. we had a few this year that the cold got to them and the momma was less than a momma (sad but true). So when we went out to check on the babies sometimes two and three times a day we always found something new, sometimes good, some times bad, but we dealt with it the best we knew how. The good was when we seen a doe have her kids and was doing exactly what she was supposed to, cleaning them off, let them feed, just being the best momma a goat could be, that was always the exciting part. the bad part was when we found one that had passed and there was nothing we could do about it, weather it passed from maybe getting to cold and not having enough to eat after it was born, or maybe the momma accidentally rolled over on it and suffocated it, or we even had a few still born that’s these are all the worst and such a hard thing to try and teach my kids that sometimes accidents happens and we can’t control everything, their slowly learning. The ugly part is when we go check and we find one alive but just barley, the things that go through your mind as you have a cold wet baby goat wrapped in a blanket with the heater on full blast driving the 15 miles back to the house. I’m sitting there rubbing it, talking to it (yea silly i know but sometimes i swear it works), or rocking it back and forth (that’s just the mom in me, haha). When we get them home it takes hours to bring them back to life so to say, the first hour or so your sitting there doing all you have learned to do and hoping for the best, i can say with confidence i did not lose any baby goats due to almost freezing to death! It’s a long process but i’m willing to go though the process so i can say, Hey i tried and i succeeded!