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Here are the babies enjoying their first day of summer. On the left is Freddie. He is the baby that I had to deliver over a month ago. In the middle is Hope, the preemie and to the right is her sister, Faith.
This is Hope. When she was born, I really didn't think she would make it. Her Mom had buried her in the hay (not a good sign). I wasn't even sure she was alive, until I noticed her barely breathing. So I cleaned her off and put her in what we call the "baby pen." I always freeze extra colostrum from the previous years for "emergency" cases like this. So I thawed that out and was able to get Hope to drink some of it. I figured we had a fighting chance. The next morning, I wasn't sure what I would find. There she was, trying to sit up and I knew I had a fighter! And here she is a month and a half old - very healthy!
The bad thing about preemies is that you don't know how far along in the development process they are. If they are born too early, not everything is completely working yet. I was very lucky with Hope. I've had two other preemies - one I lost after two weeks and one that like Hope.
When the babies are about a week old, they pay a visit to Dr. Brian (our "friendly" vet) to get dehorned. It sounds like a very cruel thing to do to the animals, but it isn't. Dr. Brian (real name is Dr. Cowdrey, but everyone knows him as Dr. Brian) puts them to sleep, so they don't feel anything. Dehorning the goat makes them so much easier for the breeder (me!!) to handle them. Secondly, the goats don't get caught in fences or trees. I was talking to a local farmer once that originally didn't dehorned his goats. He let his best stud goat out into the pasture and the goat disappear for over a week. They eventually found the goat dead hanging from a tree. The goat had tried to get some leaves from a branch in the tree and his horns had gotten tangled in the branches of the tree. He couldn't get out and eventually starved to death. So now, I dehorn all of my goats. And all goats get horns - both boys and girls. Supposedly the only goats that you can't dehorned are the angora goats (fiber goats) because they have blood running through their horns and they could bleed to death if you dehorned them.
Back to the babies, they are all doing well. I am still bottle feeding them twice a day. I will continue that until the end of the month when I will start weaning them.
