Getting 3 week old baby goats...need advice

[Larkspur88]

This is my first time getting baby goats. I had adults before. They were born the 10th and I'm getting them Saturday. I'm so excited! From what I've read I need to continue to bottle feed them some for a few more weeks as well as feed them regular goat food. Where do I get goat milk or a goat milk supplement? Would TSC carry it or other farm stores? I want to be fully prepared before I bring the brothers home this weekend.

 

[Stacykins]

This is my first time getting baby goats. I had adults before. They were born the 10th and I'm getting them Saturday. I'm so excited! From what I've read I need to continue to bottle feed them some for a few more weeks as well as feed them regular goat food. Where do I get goat milk or a goat milk supplement? Would TSC carry it or other farm stores? I want to be fully prepared before I bring the brothers home this weekend.

The minimum age you will need to bottle feed is at least eight weeks. Longer is better. So yes, you will need to bottle feed them. Is the breeder starting them on the bottle? If they're on the dam when you pick them up, you are going to have a heck of a time getting them to eat from a bottle. It will be a massive, frustrating headache for you.

You can use plain whole cows milk from the store if you cannot get fresh goat's milk, and they will thrive on it. That is actually much better for them than the powdered milk replacers. The milk replacers you buy from TSC often cause goat kids to scour (a term for diarrhea). As you can imagine, scouring is not good for any baby animal, it causes them to become weak and dehydrated.

You need to calculate how much to feed them. Goat kids can easily be overfed, since they don't always stop drinking milk when they're overfilled. You can find the calculation here, along with other information. You calculate how much milk they should be eating based on their weight. As they gain weight, the amount of milk increases with them.

kid without an adult goat to learn from will be slow to learn how to eat hay and goat feed, and sometimes slow to drink from a bucket. But always make sure the kids have hay to nibble on (they will learn to eat it after mouthing it) and water to drink. Once or twice a day, try them with a tiny amount of goat food, a small handful. Most of the time it'll go to waste. Eventually they learn it is tasty, and once that happens, you can slowly increase the amount they eat.

 

[Larkspur88]

Thanks!