NEW BABIES HITTING THE GROUND

goatboy1973

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Thanks to all for the well wishes! UPDATE: Today my Dad (the other part of Calfee Farms and my buddy and right hand man) called me at work to tell me that one of our Koy Ranch Spanish does had twins out in the open field and one of them isn't moving. I was close by, but in my work attire (suit and tie). I am a regional coordinator for our local blood bank and had just finished a meeting with a client. I got to the farm and looked with the aid of binoculars and indeed, there lay a tired 1st time momma with 2 big lumps of baby goat out in the wide open pasture with the closest goat half a mile away. I went in the barn and changed out of my dress shoes and into a pair of rubber knee boots and tucked my pant legs into the boots and tucked my tie into my shirt so I wouldn't accidentally dip it into afterbirth. I grabbed a 5 gal bucket and filled it 1/4 of the way with shop towels and headed to the field. The momma goat jumped up and sprinted to another pasture with the rest of the herd never looking back. She abandoned her kids so I thought. We tried to herd her back to her newborn kids several times without success. So I told dad that we would probably need to start bottle feeding the twin that was still alive. I headed back to the house with a 5 gallon bucket of baby goat to bottle feed when I heard a peep out of the corner of one of the loafing sheds and a doe that looked as if she wasn't that far along had birthed in the 30 minutes it took to find out that the Spanish momma rejected her kids. Then the light bulb went off in my head. I took the surviving Spanish twin over to the commercial doe that had just kidded and dried the twin off with a shop towel and grabbed a handful of commercial doe afterbirth and began slathering it all over the orphaned twin. I then placed the orphan right beside the newly born commercial kid and watched the commercial doe clean both kids off and nudge both her kid and the orphan toward her udder for some colostrum. In a million years this will not happen to me again. Later on this evening, Dad called me and told me that the Spanish momma came to the barn and took her twin back. Go figure! During all this, I managed not to get one bit of goat juice on my clothes. LOL!!! Total today we had 3 kids born and 2 survived. The one we lost was stillborn or died shortly after birth. I got back to the office and no one knew what I had been through. They wouldn't have believed me if I told them I was helping to bring baby goats into the world. I was the best dressed farmer in Tennessee!!! What a lunch break I had today.
:yuckyuck:weee:idunno
 

madcow

Loving the herd life
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So glad that the 2 made it and sorry for the loss of the other. You were really thinking on your feet about putting the temporarily rejected kid with the other new mother. Surprised that the first mother came back after her remaining kid, because by that time it should have smelled like the other's baby. Go figure goats. At least you don't have a bottle baby on your hands. Congrats on your first births, in a suit and tie no less!
 

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