Help! Watery scours in baby goats!

[Livia Stouffer]

I cannot imagine why your vet told you not to feed whole cow milk. From experience with raising literally hundreds of baby goats I can tell you that baby goats do just fine on cow milk and that calves thrive on goat milk. When I was raising kids and had milk cows, the kids got cow milk and the calves got goat milk. I was on a CAE prevention program. CAE is carried in the milk, so if I fed goat milk I had to pasteurize it. Cows do not carry CAE so I could feed it raw.

Bear in mind that some kids do just fine on replacer and others simply cannot tolerate it. That is true even for the expensive replacers made especially for kids. Kids that cannot tolerate replacer may scour, they may not grow well, and others simply blow up and die very quickly. Kids that bloat will do so without warning and usually within about 20 minutes after being fed. If you are going to feed replacer, which from personal experience I do not recommend, keep a supply of GasX on hand. It is very effective in treating bloat both in kids and in adult goats.

I have not read the full thread but here is a formula for baby goats that a Boer breeder came up with to feed her kids. I think I saw it printed in the America Boer Goat magazine. Take a gallon jug of store milk. Pour off about a quart. Add to the jug a cup of buttermilk and a can of evaporated (not sweetened condensed) milk. Shake it up and fill the jug back up with some of the milk you poured off. Or you can just feed milk from the store. As I said, I cannot imagine why your vet told you not to feed it.

I think we will try the formula for a while longer, but will definitely bring up the whole milk thing to him. I will try the formula probably for a week, while keeping a close eye on them, and being exact with the feedings.
I'm thinking maybe we were feeding too much with the cows milk, which caused the first scours. But I don't want to go right out and not try what the vet said, because I don't know better than him.