Our Right to Self Reliance

It’s been a busy couple of weeks here in Lake Self Reliance….

The baby goats are arriving!  Baby goats are rather like dividends of the investment of good animal husbandry.  If you treat your productive friends well and see to their needs, they’ll not only provide you with the best milk you’ll ever drink (or eggs, if your productive friends wear feathers) but also about once a year you’ll find yourself rewarded with a bundle of joy—or six.  Or twelve!

Out at my dearest friend’s place, where my goats are boarded with her goats, spring has definitely sprung.  The day before Christmas, a Nubian doe my friend had purchased in kid a few months ago had triplets; they are Nicholas, Holly and Noel.  On February 20th, my Nubian doe named Shasta had beautiful F1 Kinder triplets.  They’ve been named Adam, Rainer (Rainy, of course!) and Helen (are you seeing a theme here?  LOL!)  At 2:30 a.m. on March 2nd, my friend’s F2 Kinder doe named Cookie had one large single F3 doeling who has been dubbed ButterCookie…and the following evening, on March 3rd, one of my Kinder does had F2 triplets—all doelings!—who have been named Annie, Cassia and Lady.  The birth of ButterCookie is particularly exciting as she is the first kid who was kidded out by a doe that my friend raised from dripping wet, minutes old.  It’s quite a milestone for a goat owner—not terribly different from becoming a grandmother! 

Here’s ButterCookie, making her internet debut being held by my honey when she came to visit us.  She weighed four and a half pounds at birth which is a bit on the large side for a Kinder (you expect about two to four pound kids) but she was a single and single kids tend to be larger, as you might expect.  She is healthy and sprightly, very intelligent and observative, has a good appetite and is already trying to manipulate her environment just as all kids do…it’s their job, you know.

The Christmas kids are now in a moveable outdoor pen which we call The Boarding School, as they are big enough to take the weather.  The bitty ones are in the indoor rearing pen, mostly for the ease of access that situation affords for every two to four hours feedings.  That’s ’round the clock, by the way, for the first 72 hours for healthy kids; then you can start putting them on a schedule of three times a day feedings for the next couple of weeks, and finally just night and morning.  By this week-end, the little ones will be being offered good alfalfa and interesting grain mixtures that include Cheerios and dried fruits, with a bit of goat milk replacer formula dusted over it to entice them and encourage them to identify it as food.

There are still two does yet to kid this spring, within the next three weeks, then one more doe to kid later this summer.  They could have anywhere from one to four kids each…more is possible, but not highly likely.  We do seem to be having a run on triplets this year!  And lots of doelings, which is very nice.  Generally speaking we don’t make any decisions about placing kids until they are six months old, but at this point it’s looking like we’ll want to keep every single one of these doelings.  With three completely unrelated Kinder bucks we’ve a wide enough gene pool choice that we don’t have to worry about close inbreeding; no matter who is whose daddy, there are two other bucks to choose from.  We will grow these girls out for eighteen months before we look at who to breed them with.  Industry standard for breeding standard sized (Nubian, Saanen, Toggenburg, et al) goat does is eight months of age or when they weigh 80 pounds, whichever comes first, but since a doe grows until she is six years old (a buck grows until he’s four, but most of it in the first six to twelve months), we’re just not comfortable breeding them that young.  Yes, we essentially lose a year of breeding, but healthy, well-grown does have healthy babies and we have no reason at all to push it.

I’m glad the weather is finally getting a bit warmer, so the kids can come out and play most days.  Raising baby goats by hand takes quite a bit of attention and time, but it’s worth it.  Bottle raised babies are bonded to humans which makes them sooooo much easier to handle when they are adults.  We have some does that were not bottle raised, and every time we need to medicate them, trim their hooves, take them somewhere, it’s always a negotiation.  The bottle raised goats pretty much just want to know if you have a cookie for them when they’re done, LOL!

We’re quite pleased with the dividends we’ve gotten on our investment.  This “stock market” beats the Dow Jones hands down!

And here’s a gratuitous picture of ButterCookie, just because she’s a treasure.

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