It's become clear that our current arrangement, in which Faithful the buck is allowed to run with the rest of the goat herd year-round, is not going to work any longer. After Prudence's surprise twins last summer, she almost immediately became pregnant again, along with Temerity, Patience, and Mercy (who was also supposed to be retired). Because the fall was so cool, they went into heat earlier than usual, and thus gave birth earlier than usual, in mid-February.
Goats are not fond of cold and wet weather, and it's really not a good time for babies to thrive, so it's not surprising that we had our first casualties this year. Temerity, Patience, and Mercy all gave birth to triplets within a week of each other, and Temerity and Mercy both had one stillborn. Among those surviving, four had to be kept in the house for several days until they were strong enough to stand and take a bottle. Mercy's labor was long and difficult, and she's now on penicillin for a possible infection; she seems to be doing fairly well, but her milk production is ridiculously low and we may just dry her up as soon as we sell some of the babies. Temerity and Patience are also not producing as much milk as we'd like to see, but we've realized that they may not be getting enough calories, so we've increased their grain ration and added alfalfa pellets as well. We're also giving them fenugreek seeds as an experiment, and I'm thinking of concocting a quinoa/molasses/fenugreek treat to see if that perks them up a bit.
About a week after all the triplets, Prudence quietly popped out a couple of beautiful does (one of them is pictured above), and is doing very well. Since she's been such a good mother in the past, and since we don't want to milk her, she's stuck in the kidding pen for now with her two as well as all the other kids! The others, of course, are being bottlefed, but that doesn't stop them from bugging her constantly, even though she has no compunction about knocking them across the pen. They all seem to be reasonably content for now, and will be let out with the rest as soon as the weather improves a bit. We got a lot of snow last week, and no one's been venturing outside much.
So we're starting to sell off baby goats again, which is always a long and tedious process--not to mention a bit sad, since they're all so adorable. Besides Prue's twins (the other one of which is dark brown), we have four doelings (another brown one and three black and white) and three bucklings (all black and white). Among many other reasons to approve of Faithful, he's been a very good producer of does!
