Our goat experiences
We got our goats a little over a year ago. We bought a purebred Nubian buck and two does who were half BOER, one quarter Nubian and a quarter Lamanche and all were just two weeks old.
I wanted half Boer for the meat end but some dairy blood since my wife's whole angle was the milk. We haven't been too disappointed though one of the doe's teats are very small and difficult to milk. Whether that's more Boer trait I don't know.
One thing I will mention though is that if you do get them to breed (can't stop them but I mean with the INTENT to breed) and get a buck like we did please learn a lesson from us. We raised them all together and a week or so before the girls were due to have their kids we separated the buck.
Big mistake. We should have kept him separate from the beginning and better yet put a wether in with him for company. Goats are social animals and don't do well alone to the point sometimes of stopping eating and dying.
I have a five wire electric fence with a stout wire fence outside of that about four and a half feet tall. Not tall enough. I am pretty much paycheck to paycheck and couldn't immediately afford new higher fencing but suffice it to say, Jack easily cleared the fence. But the problem was I had steel T-posts every two feet and it was lucky he didn't impale himself on the way out.
He kept breaking into the girls quarters and they were due to drop any day which could have been disasterous to the newborns, likely not intentional on Ol' Jack's part but he likely would have stomped them to death as he was really just a big dumb kid himself.
I had to shoot Jack and though I have been killing rabbits and chickens for awhile, Jack was my buddy and I didn't want to do it. But did.
We have two bucks and one doe from the girls and are keeping one boy a buck and the other a whether.
Another sad mishap was that the second birthing occurred very early in the morning five days after the first. Next time I will literally sleep out there when we know it's coming (we weren't positive since the first batch occurred without a hitch in the middle of the night.
When the second boy was born he evidently was oxygen deprived and the mom had a little tear and due him now being somewhat retarted, he wouldn't suckle. We tried for two weeks but every bottle feeding (three times a day) was over an hour just to watch it trickle down his throat.
The mom goat would not let him nurse right from the beginning. Maybe she sensed he was damaged, we don't know.
So I had to dispatch JJ as well. Lessons learned.
I should have stayed up all night even if it meant calling in "sick" the next day and we would have likely been able to prevent the prolonged birth that JJ experienced resulting in his demise.
Here is a link to my wife's blog on the goats.
