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2C'em Walkin' Ranch

Answer Lady
by Melisa Mason

Hi, welcome to Answer Lady. :)

Q. Well, a  friend the other day, told me that all animals should birth natural on their own in the pasture. She thinks it stresses them out to allow them  to birth any other way. What do you think? Any input would be wonderful.

A. There are many different approaches here.  I personally like to keep the mother goat with the herd until she kids if there are no other factors preventing me from doing this.  When she kids, I scoop up her and the kids and take them to a bonding pen where I keep an eye out for any issues that would need my intervention and allow her to bond.  Another reason I like to do this is when the mother goat first kids, she is reluctant to leave the kids for any reason, which means she may miss feedings and may not go to get water as often as she needs to.  So in the bonding pen, she has water, hay, feed at easy reach and when the kids are up and around and the mom looks healthy, I put them back with the herd.  Sometimes this is a week and sometimes this is a day or two.

Q. Hi I'm new to goats -- I just got my first three this weekend and I was wondering for people that feed the sweet feed to their babies do you feed it twice a day or just once? There is a southern states sweet feed made by southern states for goats it's called kid& goat sweet feed. and I usually leave a bowl of hay down all day for them. Right know there are two soon-to-be-fixed bucks and one that's not fixed. They also have a large amount of grass and stuff in their pen they're eating down. Also I got something called a billy block and a big red mineral block. Are these the only one's I need for them?

A. I don't personally use a sweet feed.  Instead I use a kid and goat medicated feed with a med for coccidia and it has selenium in it.  This helps get rid of a lot of problems for me.  I also vaccinate for pneumonia with Super Poly which combined with the feed gets rid of 75% of the problems I see posted.  The medicated feed has minerals, but you can put out a mineral block too.  My goats will not eat hay off the ground, so you may want to find a way to provide it above the ground.  I like to have baking soda free choice for my goats.  This helps prevent bloat.  Plenty of fresh water, and if you need to prune your trees, they love leaves and will welcome the branches that you can give them. 

Q. Inbreeding and Line Breeding, what is acceptable?

I have been trying to figure out if it is acceptable to breed back (breeding does back to sire). I know that in rabbits it is sometimes advisable to breed back to enhance certain qualities, however, I wasn't sure and haven't been able to find any conclusive information on breeding back in goats. Right now the only buck I have is the herd sire to all the new yearling does that should be breeding this fall, but I am hesitant to breed them back to their sire. All advice, opinions, experiences, etc...are welcomed and will be taken into consideration.

 

A. Inbreeding  is breeding an offspring to a Parent or Brother to Sister.  I know there are those that do it in commercial stock, but I would not.  This produces offspring with too many shared genes providing the chance to produce undesirable recessive traits. 

 

Line breeding however is acceptable and research
suggests that line bred animals would share about 25% of the same genes. This is breeding any two animals that share one parent (not two). So NOT brother and sister, but half brother to half sister. This is a much more acceptable approach.

Like all things, everyone has to figure out what works for them.

Hope this information helps.