bottle baby: warm or cold?

[_sonshine_]

If you bottlefeed should you give milk replacer to the kid warm or cold? I read that if you give it cold they will not over eat. Would this be the same for cow's milk and goat's milk? Or would you give cold milk to weanlings..... I dont think I would do it for a newborn but IDK???

Any thoughts??

 

[aggieterpkatie]

It depends. How old is the kid? I'd feed warm for the first few days or a week, then give cold if switching to a lambar (free choice feeding). If I was just going to bottle a few times a day, I'd feed warm.

 

[miron28]

i always warmed the milk up when i feed mine. just thought it would make it feel like it was its mothers milk

 

[cmjust0]

Feeding cold milk or replacer cold has two advantages, and they're both for large scale commercial operations..

#1) you don't have to worry about keeping milk heated through "lambar" systems like katie mentioned, and

#2) kids on free-choice systems like that will ration themselves on milk if it's cold...most likely because it beats starving to death -- if only by a little. Kinda like how goats will ration themselves on filthy, disgusting water because drinking dirty water is moderately better than dying of dehydration.

If you're talking about bottle babies, though...where you actually sit with a bottle and feed the kid(s) a certain amount at set intervals...then yeah, you're definitely gonna wanna heat the milk.

When I heat milk, I use a thermometer and get it to just under 110*, which puts it right in the 100-103 range by the time you transfer it to bottles and all that good stuff.

 

[samplekasi]

I have been thinking about the lambar method this year as I wil be having many more babies than I did last year so I am thinking about making my own with the parts from Jeffers but this post bring up other ?s if you so a lambar doesnot the milk go bad I have heard of some just filling it inthe morning others change it out 2 timesw a day or twice a day. I always warm my singlew bottles and when they are bigger then I would not worry but everyone is so into warm milk even one person I have heard say they lambar I am so confused that I have actually thought up a way to make a lambar out of 2 buckets put ice inbetween to keep milk cold when outside it gets to 100 here in OKlahoma during the summer and milk can go pretty rank fairly fast.

 

[Roll farms]

I don't use a lambar but I've read of other folks making big chunks of ice by freezing milk to keep the milk cool longer in summer... since it's milk it won't water it down as it melts.

I've found new kids are much easier to start on a bottle w/ warm milk.
When my daughter tells me she couldn't get a kid to eat, I already know she didn't get the milk warm enough...I reheat it and try again and suddenly they eat like a pig.

 

[_sonshine_]

Ahhh I see now. Thanks!