bottle feeding baby goats

[goats rule 101]

Hi I've been looking for a breed of goat to get and I finally found one, fainters. I found a breeder near me and she gave me the option to either bottle feed them or wait until weaning. I really want to bottle feed but was wondering if this is a good idea. I wouldn't be able to feed them between 6:00 am and 3:00 to 3:30 p.m. for school reasons. I live in minnesota and would be getting them in January. I would have to put heat lamps on them or something since I do not have a heated barn. I am in 4-h and really want them to be friendly. These would also be my first goats but I have taken care of my neighbors goats (profile picture) for 2 weeks time. Any opinions on what I should do?

 

[chooks4life]

Quote: Dairies and farms tend to use automatic feeders and troughs, not individually bottle-feed 100 kids or lambs per day by hand. Having a lone orphan attached to you is a lot more work than dropping by a pen to feed a whole little herd of them.
Quote: I don't know what milk is like where you are, but here it's homogenized and pasteurized, and will kill them. If they've had colostrum and are old enough to be eating other things they might cope, but otherwise, no. My current bottle fed orphan was being fed whole milk from the store and it was killing her. She was nearly dead by the time I got her. Took a long time, many months, to get her into any vaguely healthy shape.
Quote: I'm sure you wouldn't have recommended this if it hadn't worked for you, and I'm sure you're experienced enough but I will just add for the thread poster's benefit that while this would be fine for older kids, in general it is much safer to feed four times or even more per day while they're young, in smaller feeds.

Two large feeds a day can be fatal for a very young one. That's against the advice of basically every sheep and goat keeper I've ever met or read, and it was exactly what the previous owner of my current lamb was doing --- two large feeds a day. She was in a horrible state, it's really miraculous she's still alive.

To the thread starter: please do a lot of reading up on the subject. Forums are great but what works for someone else won't necessarily work for you and different breeds have different needs, etc, so you'd need to tailor your feeding to whatever type you have.

Best wishes to everyone.

 

[TOP KNOT]

Quote:

This is info partially derived from books on rearing goats and sheep, and the animals in question were vaccinated. So that's not it. The same info is on every website I've ever found on rearing kids and lambs; infrequent feeding in very young animals is often fatal. All of the lambs and kids referred to were vaccinated.

My current lamb wasn't, and she did develop pulpy kidney, aka enterotoxemia, and it took a lot of work to recover her. But being vaccinated against it doesn't guarantee they won't get it. None of my other kids or lambs were vaccinated and they didn't get enterotoxemia.

Your experiences are quite different from the ones myself and everyone I have heard of have experienced, but I don't doubt you're speaking of what it true to you, so each to their own I guess. I would not use your recommended methods because I've only ever heard of them resulting in death, and likewise I guess you'd not use my recommended methods because your experience with yours has been positive. Either way I'll stick to what I know works, and no doubt you will too. All the best.

You've cited one dairy as an example; do you know how the kids there received their probiotics? Or what temperature the colostrum was heated to? Some probiotics can survive a certain level of heating that some viruses cannot. Many lambs and kids receive an initial dose of probiotics from eating soil, and in fact some old farming texts made a point of recommending allowing clean soils to be eaten by the very young animals. Obviously it's not recommended to use a farmed area's soil, though, and it'd be wise to be sure of the soil's origin.
Quote:
For a while we were able to buy pasteurized homogenized cow milk at a greatly reduced rate to feed our kids. According to you, they all should have died but they did great on it.

It's according to scientific studies which were initially conducted trying to prove that cooked milk, or pasteurized milk, was just as good as raw milk. The infants fed that milk died. The problem with cooked milk is lack of probiotics, basically. A lamb or kid that's had an initial dose of probiotics can tolerate cooked milk later on, but if the first feed and those thereafter contain no probiotics, and the infant doesn't get them from any other source either, this is where the issues arise.

If the infants get the probiotics from another source there is a decent chance they'll live, but obviously they require an initial dose of them. My question is where these kids you speak of got their probiotics. I haven't heard of any kid or lamb that has not received any probiotics surviving, and all the pasteurized milk formulas I have heard of contain probiotics. But they can be obtained from other sources.

Best wishes to all.

 

[TOP KNOT]

Hi I've been looking for a breed of goat to get and I finally found one, fainters. I found a breeder near me and she gave me the option to either bottle feed them or wait until weaning. I really want to bottle feed but was wondering if this is a good idea. I am 12 yers old and could feed them before school, around 6:00 a.m. and after which is usually 3:00 to 3:30 p.m. I live in minnesota and would be getting them in January. I would have to put heat lamps on them or something since I do not have a heated barn. I am in 4-h and really want them to be friendly. These would also be my first goats but I have taken care of my neighbors goats (profile picture) for 2 weeks time. Any opinions on what I should do?

It would be best for the kid to be with her mother until weaning. She should be fed more often than than you will be able. If you want to imprint on her, go to visit and spend time with her while she is with her mother. She will grow up more healthy this way. I raised goats for 4-H growing up. Good luck and have fun!

 

[goats rule 101]

Ok thanks I think I will do that! I'm not exactly fit to be a mama goat!

 

[TOP KNOT]

Ok thanks I think I will do that! I'm not exactly fit to be a mama goat!

It can be a lot of work! When I was 16 I had 5 milk goats. I had a ''goat friend'' who was in her 70's at the time. At 9 p.m. one evening the forest preserve ranger/outdoor education man came to our door!! He had 2 deer fawns!! The mother had got hit by a car and killed. He said to me ''I understand that you have milk goats'' He left those fawns with me and I milked the goats and bottle fed them! I had to get up at 2 a.m. to fed them. They would make a muffled mmee sound until I gave them their bottle. I had them for 3 days until the hooved animal humane society came to pick them up. You have to have a license to keep deer. They thanked me for caring for them and off they went. It was such an opportunity to have the chance to experience that!! So having goats has its perks! Have so much fun with your goat!!

 

[chooks4life]

Wish you all the best with your goats. Goats are often quite easily tamed, and if you spend the time with them they will likely come to trust you.

I also think it's best to let them wean off their mothers first. What didn't go in while they were infants, you can't put in later; no amount of care later on makes up for a deprived infancy. Formula fed babies typically have greater troubles in later life and often don't make it to the same standards of health as mother-reared babies, though I must say the recent formulas are really closing that gap. I've bottle reared various goat and sheep orphans and they sure can make great pets.

Another issue to consider is that if they bond to you as a mother, they will likely scream for either a good part or even all of the day when separated from you --- even all night too. Some will accept being left alone, others will not, even with company.

About heater lamps, well, being in Australia I don't have any real experience with extremely low temperatures, but I'd think if they don't have these lamps on now, and the adults of their flock don't either, or they aren't reliant on a heated barn, then there is no need. If you leave them till weaning or whatever age you want to pick them up, maybe some jackets would be sufficient. Goats and sheep fit quite well into vests and cardigans, etc. But obviously if you do that you'd need to make sure they're not able to be eaten by them. A cosy shelter with bales of hay to snuggle between should do the job, but of course I don't know what it's like there.


All the best.

 

[goats rule 101]

It can be a lot of work! When I was 16 I had 5 milk goats. I had a ''goat friend'' who was in her 70's at the time. At 9 p.m. one evening the forest preserve ranger/outdoor education man came to our door!! He had 2 deer fawns!! The mother had got hit by a car and killed. He said to me ''I understand that you have milk goats'' He left those fawns with me and I milked the goats and bottle fed them! I had to get up at 2 a.m. to fed them. They would make a muffled mmee sound until I gave them their bottle. I had them for 3 days until the hooved animal humane society came to pick them up. You have to have a license to keep deer. They thanked me for caring for them and off they went. It was such an opportunity to have the chance to experience that!! So having goats has its perks! Have so much fun with your goat!!

Wow that would be a really cool experience!

 

[goats rule 101]

Thank you both for all you had to add. I'm so excited to get my goats!

 

[chooks4life]

You're welcome and best wishes with your goats. They're quite entertaining.

I have lived on a deer farm, where they were left wild until rounded up to be sold for slaughter, and I must say they were some of the most dangerous 'livestock' I've ever encountered. The more tame they were, the more dangerous they were. There was a bottle fed red deer stag and like most stags reared by hand he quickly became extremely dangerous. Some people manage to make their deer tame, but while I like them I'm not sure I'd farm them offhand! Even the fallow stags would come charging from over a kilometer away to come and attack if they saw you in the paddock. They jumped the 10-foot fences whenever the mood took them, too.