I actually was coming here to post about this very thing . . .
My doe, Dash, has a very uneven udder. She is a FF, 8 days fresh, and at about 3 days fresh she found something to cut her right teat on . . . probably the place where she chooses to squeeze through a barbed wire fence (from which we've now removed the bottom wire) rather than walk 20 feet to go through the always-open gate. The barbed wire was already here, incidentally, and I don't expect it to keep goats contained, but it is somewhat useful for the donkeys, so I don't want to rip it out entirely.
Anyway, she got a cut just above her teat and a scratch right down the front of the teat. I soon noticed that her right side (the scratched side) was getting much bigger than the left, and thought perhaps it was sore enough that she wasn't letting her kids nurse off of it. I checked to make sure it wasn't clogged or anything, and it wasn't, but she did seem to kick at the kids once when they would start to suck on that side. She's a milk goat, that's the only reason we got her (although she makes a fantastic pet as well), so I didn't want her to dry up on that side, and I wanted to learn to milk, so I started milking that side - it was always visibly much fuller than the other side. I saw the kids drinking from the "empty" side pretty regularly, and some from the scratched/full side. After a couple of days I tried to milk the smaller side, realizing that I did want to maintain production in both sides . . . I couldn't get more than a couple of tiny squirts out. It looks fine when it comes out, nice milk, but that side feels pretty empty and the teat is smaller and I just can't get almost anything out of it.
Are the kids just emptying it out? I am leaving them on her all the time until they're a couple of weeks old. Or are they maybe drinking mostly from the scratched side, so all of her production is concentrated in that one half? I'm so confused. I'm still not good enough at milking to do it with both hands at once (or my left hand at all, really), and I have to be careful milking the scratched teat to not hurt her (she scratched it again just yesterday), so I've just been milking her one side really, but I don't know if that's the right thing to do or if it's likely to cause her other side to dry up. The scratched side gave me 1 pound of milk today, with kids on all the time and poor milking technique (still) on my part. I didn't even try the other side today because she was finished her grain by the time I finished the one side, but in previous days the production would have been more like 2 teaspoons, even when I really tried, with massage, "butting" with my hand, and trying different techniques for the actual milking part. Should I just keep trying different things? The same things in the hopes that it can bring production up? Should I concentrate on the "low production side" or the high production side, or make a point of doing both? I'm so confused.
I wish my eight-year-old experienced doe had kidded first, then I wouldn't be so worried that I would screw up her udder for life by doing something wrong now.
) it doesn't matter if kids were on the doe or not, sometimes they just produce more from one side than the other. My doe's left side produces more than her right side. Doesn't bother me, doesn't matter that I milk them evenly every day. I'm not about to leave milk in the left side to get it to produce less than it is now, and I can't really find the time to milk her right side more frequently. The only issue I can see is when I show her I may have to milk a tad out of the left side to even the halves up a bit if it's very noticeable.
