We have four goats. Aurora and Persephone were rescued in 2014 from a summer farm camp Tabitha went to. The girls have extra teats which are considered a deformity so their owner couldn’t show them in competitions. Because of the deformity, their owner (who was also the camp director) was going to slaughter them. Tabitha asked the camp director if we could buy the goats from her. Two weeks later we brought them home!
Getting Ready
We’ve always wanted goats, even when we lived in the city, and we knew we’d have them one day, but we weren’t quite ready to have them in two weeks. We stayed up late and worked by the headlights of Doug’s truck up until the night before we brought the goats home to get the barn cleaned out (it was being used as a storage area), build new stalls in the barn, and install goat-proof fencing.
Buddy Blue
A few months after we brought the girls home we rented a beautiful blue-eyed Nigerian Dwarf goat buck named Buddy Blue to breed with Aurora and Persephone. Aurora and Persephone are Oberhasli goats which means they are medium-sized goats. Since this was going to be their first pregnancies, we wanted the buck to be a miniature goat so the babies would be smaller for the first-time moms.
Once Buddy Blue was done with his task he went back home and we excitedly waited for goat kids to be born!
Pregnancies
Both Aurora and Persephone had perfect pregnancies with no complications, stress, or worries. Birthing was another story. Persephone went into labor on April 22nd. She gave birth to Chloe and Orion. Birthing was hard for her. We think the toll it took on her body set in motion a series of health problems that led to her death when Chloe and Orion were five months old. Before she died, she had just weaned them off milk, but I’ve always felt so bad that they still needed mom and they couldn’t understand where she went.
Saying Goodbye Too Soon
Aurora went into labor on May 1st. Her daughter, Faylinn, was born without any problems. She had complications delivering her son, Danny Boy, and he ended up dying half-way out of the birth canal. When Aurora delivered him we did CPR for forty-five minutes trying to revive him but we couldn’t. We were heartbroken. She was confused. She kept calling for him and when we let her say goodbye to him, she kept nudging him trying to get him to stand up.
We are thankful for the three healthy kids, but because of the devastation of losing Persephone and Danny Boy, we made the decision to never breed the goats again.
Birthing
Click here to see pictures of Persephone and Aurora giving birth.
Goat Kids
All four goats are so affectionate. Even though they each weigh over a hundred pounds, they think they’re big lap dogs. When we sit outside with them, they all try to climb into our laps to snuggle. They even challenge each other to see who gets to sit on our laps!
Toys
We built the goats a climbing toy out of pallets and they love playing “King of the Mountain” on it. They take turns pushing each other off and the winner gets the top platform. They also love playing on their tires. When the neighbors moved out they gave us some semi-truck tires for the goats. The tires are huge and make the perfect climbing toys! Orion is our sensitive goat. He gets his feelings hurt by the girls when they push him off the pallets or tires.
Weather
Orion doesn’t like the cold. He prefers to stay in the barn when the temperatures start to drop whereas the girls are a bit more tolerant of the cold so they stay outside playing as long as they can. None of the goats like rain. I’m pretty sure they’re convinced the rain is going to melt them. At the first drop of rain, they all race and stampede into the barn as fast as they can.
Barn
The goats share the nine hundred square foot barn with the sheep. They’re afraid of the dark so we keep a light on at the barn to help protect them from the scary cats and frogs that sleep in the barn with them at night.
Food
Despite popular belief, goats won’t eat tin cans and they won’t eat everything they see. Goats are like toddlers. They explore their world by putting things in their mouths. If they don’t like what they picked up, they’ll drop it. Our goats are very particular about what they eat. They usually won’t eat their hay if it’s dusty or if it has touched the ground. As soon as the hay touches the ground, it becomes very expensive bedding!
We feed the goats grass hay twice a day. They also get a baking soda supplement. The only treat we give them is a carrot on their birthday. We don’t give them any other treats because goats are very food motivated and we don’t want them to overpower us to get the treats away from us. Also, their rumens are sensitive and we don’t want to take the risk of introducing anything that might upset their rumens (a goat with a gassy rumen is a serious medical emergency). The main reason we don’t give the goats treats is because Orion is a castrated buck. When bucks are castrated you have to be extremely careful about what they eat. The vitamin and mineral composition of the hay they eat, treats you give them, and water consumption all need to be monitored to reduce the risk of them developing urinary calculi.
A Serious Medical Emergency
Urinary calculi is a serious medication condition that happens when small pieces of calcium deposits get stuck in the urinary tract and cause blockages. It’s extremely painful and dangerous. It’s more common in male goats that have been castrated. If the wether (castrated male) isn’t seen by a veterinarian immediately it can quickly lead to death. Even the best feeding practices won’t always prevent urinary calculi because there are other factors that contribute to this condition such as castrating a buckling too young, and the high mineral content in the drinking water. Under the bad advice of a veterinarian we used for the goats at the time, Orion was castrated too young and when he was two years old he developed urinary calculi. This is Orion’s story.
