Bottle Baby

I'm told it's been a hard year on livestock. The hay shortage has affected many animals and farmers have been selling off livestock to market (aka meat).  My goats are pets are selling them off is not an option for us, however, the drought did cause us to have an early baby and now we have complications. Mom has rejected her baby. Partially because she's a man crazy goat and can't stand to be separated from her baby daddy, and partially because her udder is infected and it's painful to nurse. In the wild animal world this is bad news for the baby. Good news for baby goat, who's name has gone from Button, to Penny to Benjamin Button to BB to BiBi in honor of BiBi Netanyahu, we have compassionate humans willing to go the extra mile.

We started with an emergency trip to Tractor Supply and $30 on colostrum replacer, milk replacer  and a lamb nipple. Luckily I got in touch with some goat people who said dollar store bottles and whole milk from the grocery store was our best bet.  Check out our results with BiBi the goat.

The other thing about having a bottle baby is where do they sleep? The Billy and the mother rammed him against the fence and my donkeys were pretty intent on stomping him to death, so BiBi moved into the dog cage wearing child's pull-ups and some baby pajamas we found in the goodwill pile. Now he thinks he's a human or a dog or something other than a goat.

Baby Goat

When your dog goes nuts at 3 am, it's usually for a good reason. What we weren't expecting was a baby goat born in the hay roll. We knew about the baby, but not having been around to inspect the mother, I was about a month off on the due date.  It's a boy! Looks just like dad.

Good Maaaaaning.

Good Maaaaning!

The purpose of this blog to is bring the joy of goats to the rest of the world. When we first got goats, we saw very few online resources to learn more about our new pets, thus the title, Lonely Goatherd.  One year later, we've lost one goat, and birthed two more. We've been free ranging and contained. We've had close calls and gotten to meet our neighbors (your goats are on our porch) and we've really enjoyed watching the Olympic events our goats create.  We're not experts, we're not really farmers, we are just some folks with a little land who got a few goats to feast on the poison ivy. Along the way, we've enjoyed the trials and tribulations of goating and we hope you will too.