bottle feeding baby goats

[cassie]

If bottle feeding baby goats was nearly as much work as some people would have you believe, goat dairies would be out of business because there simply isn't enough time to feed 100 or more kids four and five time a day. You can feed them twice a day, or maybe three times a day for the first week and they will do fine on that. If you have just a kid or two, do not bother with replacer. They do much better on plain whole milk from the store. I have had kids blow up ond die even on the expensive replacers formulated just for kids. A good formula for mini goat kids and baby Boers is this. Take a jug of whole milk from the store. Pour off about a quart. Add a can of evaporated (not condensed) milk and a cup of buttermilk to the jug and shake. Add enough of the milk you poured off to fill the jug back up to the top. Kids thrive on this. Be sure to vaccinate the baby for entero and tetanus.

 

[goats rule 101]

Okay thanks!

 

[chooks4life]

Quote: Dairies and farms tend to use automatic feeders and troughs, not individually bottle-feed 100 kids or lambs per day by hand. Having a lone orphan attached to you is a lot more work than dropping by a pen to feed a whole little herd of them.
Quote: I don't know what milk is like where you are, but here it's homogenized and pasteurized, and will kill them. If they've had colostrum and are old enough to be eating other things they might cope, but otherwise, no. My current bottle fed orphan was being fed whole milk from the store and it was killing her. She was nearly dead by the time I got her. Took a long time, many months, to get her into any vaguely healthy shape.
Quote: I'm sure you wouldn't have recommended this if it hadn't worked for you, and I'm sure you're experienced enough but I will just add for the thread poster's benefit that while this would be fine for older kids, in general it is much safer to feed four times or even more per day while they're young, in smaller feeds.

Two large feeds a day can be fatal for a very young one. That's against the advice of basically every sheep and goat keeper I've ever met or read, and it was exactly what the previous owner of my current lamb was doing --- two large feeds a day. She was in a horrible state, it's really miraculous she's still alive.

To the thread starter: please do a lot of reading up on the subject. Forums are great but what works for someone else won't necessarily work for you and different breeds have different needs, etc, so you'd need to tailor your feeding to whatever type you have.

Best wishes to everyone.

 

[TOP KNOT]

Quote:

Dairies and farms tend to use automatic feeders and troughs, not individually bottle-feed 100 kids or lambs per day by hand. Having a lone orphan attached to you is a lot more work than dropping by a pen to feed a whole little herd of them.
Quote:
They do much better on plain whole milk from the store.

I don't know what milk is like where you are, but here it's homogenized and pasteurized, and will kill them. If they've had colostrum and are old enough to be eating other things they might cope, but otherwise, no. My current bottle fed orphan was being fed whole milk from the store and it was killing her. She was nearly dead by the time I got her. Took a long time, many months, to get her into any vaguely healthy shape.
Quote: I'm sure you wouldn't have recommended this if it hadn't worked for you, and I'm sure you're experienced enough but I will just add for the thread poster's benefit that while this would be fine for older kids, in general it is much safer to feed four times or even more per day while they're young, in smaller feeds.

Two large feeds a day can be fatal for a very young one. That's against the advice of basically every sheep and goat keeper I've ever met or read, and it was exactly what the previous owner of my current lamb was doing --- two large feeds a day. She was in a horrible state, it's really miraculous she's still alive.

To the thread starter: please do a lot of reading up on the subject. Forums are great but what works for someone else won't necessarily work for you and different breeds have different needs, etc, so you'd need to tailor your feeding to whatever type you have.

Best wishes to everyone.

 

[goats rule 101]

Thanks guys

 

[cassie]

Dairies and farms tend to use automatic feeders and troughs, not individually bottle-feed 100 kids or lambs per day by hand. Having a lone orphan attached to you is a lot more work than dropping by a pen to feed a whole little herd of them.
I don't know what milk is like where you are, but here it's homogenized and pasteurized, and will kill them. If they've had colostrum and are old enough to be eating other things they might cope, but otherwise, no. My current bottle fed orphan was being fed whole milk from the store and it was killing her. She was nearly dead by the time I got her. Took a long time, many months, to get her into any vaguely healthy shape.
I'm sure you wouldn't have recommended this if it hadn't worked for you, and I'm sure you're experienced enough but I will just add for the thread poster's benefit that while this would be fine for older kids, in general it is much safer to feed four times or even more per day while they're young, in smaller feeds.

Two large feeds a day can be fatal for a very young one. That's against the advice of basically every sheep and goat keeper I've ever met or read, and it was exactly what the previous owner of my current lamb was doing --- two large feeds a day. She was in a horrible state, it's really miraculous she's still alive.

To the thread starter: please do a lot of reading up on the subject. Forums are great but what works for someone else won't necessarily work for you and different breeds have different needs, etc, so you'd need to tailor your feeding to whatever type you have.

Best wishes to everyone.

I had a goat dairy in California for a long time and I have a lot of friends that had much larger dairies than I did. As for individual bottle feeding large numbers of kids, Laurewood Acres in Ripon California for many years milked over a thousand does every day which meant they could easily have well over a hundred kids at any one time on milk. They individually bottle fed each and every one of those kids. The kids were given a one quart bottle of milk twice a day. I fed my own kids twice a day. If I had premature or very small kids, they would be fed more often than twice a day, but as soon as they were strong enough they went to twice a day.They got heat treated colostrum for the first day and pasteurized goat milk or cow milk, either pasteurized or raw from then on. For a while we were able to buy pasteurized homogenized cow milk at a greatly reduced rate to feed our kids. According to you, they all should have died but they did great on it. Many purebred dairy goat breeders never feed their kids raw goat milk because they are keeping their herds CAE free. The only time I had trouble was when I was short of milk and had to feed milk replacer. Kids can and do blow up and die on even the best milk replacers. There may be automatic milk feeders on the market, but the only kind I am personally familiar with is a Lamb Bar that is essentially a bucket with a bunch of nipples around it so several kids can be fed at once. You can spend as much time as you want on your kids, but it isn't necessary. I have raised a lot of kids and I had a very low death rate. The kids were fed pasteurized milk, either goat or cow twice a day. I will say this. My experience is confined to full sized dairy goats. Mini goats may be a little more delicate and may require more frequent feeding, but four times a day should be plenty. As for the statement that large infrequent feeding being fatal, I think the problem is more likely to be due to the fact that the kids were not vaccinated for entertoxemia. I vaccinated my kids for entero and tetanus the day they were born and every four weeks thereafter until the were about three months old. I lived in an area where entero was very common, and a vet who worked for a pharmaceutical company told me the pH of our soil was the reason.

 

[chooks4life]

Quote:

This is info partially derived from books on rearing goats and sheep, and the animals in question were vaccinated. So that's not it. The same info is on every website I've ever found on rearing kids and lambs; infrequent feeding in very young animals is often fatal. All of the lambs and kids referred to were vaccinated.

My current lamb wasn't, and she did develop pulpy kidney, aka enterotoxemia, and it took a lot of work to recover her. But being vaccinated against it doesn't guarantee they won't get it. None of my other kids or lambs were vaccinated and they didn't get enterotoxemia.

Your experiences are quite different from the ones myself and everyone I have heard of have experienced, but I don't doubt you're speaking of what it true to you, so each to their own I guess. I would not use your recommended methods because I've only ever heard of them resulting in death, and likewise I guess you'd not use my recommended methods because your experience with yours has been positive. Either way I'll stick to what I know works, and no doubt you will too. All the best.

You've cited one dairy as an example; do you know how the kids there received their probiotics? Or what temperature the colostrum was heated to? Some probiotics can survive a certain level of heating that some viruses cannot. Many lambs and kids receive an initial dose of probiotics from eating soil, and in fact some old farming texts made a point of recommending allowing clean soils to be eaten by the very young animals. Obviously it's not recommended to use a farmed area's soil, though, and it'd be wise to be sure of the soil's origin.
Quote: It's according to scientific studies which were initially conducted trying to prove that cooked milk, or pasteurized milk, was just as good as raw milk. The infants fed that milk died. The problem with cooked milk is lack of probiotics, basically. A lamb or kid that's had an initial dose of probiotics can tolerate cooked milk later on, but if the first feed and those thereafter contain no probiotics, and the infant doesn't get them from any other source either, this is where the issues arise.

If the infants get the probiotics from another source there is a decent chance they'll live, but obviously they require an initial dose of them. My question is where these kids you speak of got their probiotics. I haven't heard of any kid or lamb that has not received any probiotics surviving, and all the pasteurized milk formulas I have heard of contain probiotics. But they can be obtained from other sources.

Best wishes to all.

 

[TOP KNOT]

Quote:

This is info partially derived from books on rearing goats and sheep, and the animals in question were vaccinated. So that's not it. The same info is on every website I've ever found on rearing kids and lambs; infrequent feeding in very young animals is often fatal. All of the lambs and kids referred to were vaccinated.

My current lamb wasn't, and she did develop pulpy kidney, aka enterotoxemia, and it took a lot of work to recover her. But being vaccinated against it doesn't guarantee they won't get it. None of my other kids or lambs were vaccinated and they didn't get enterotoxemia.

Your experiences are quite different from the ones myself and everyone I have heard of have experienced, but I don't doubt you're speaking of what it true to you, so each to their own I guess. I would not use your recommended methods because I've only ever heard of them resulting in death, and likewise I guess you'd not use my recommended methods because your experience with yours has been positive. Either way I'll stick to what I know works, and no doubt you will too. All the best.

You've cited one dairy as an example; do you know how the kids there received their probiotics? Or what temperature the colostrum was heated to? Some probiotics can survive a certain level of heating that some viruses cannot. Many lambs and kids receive an initial dose of probiotics from eating soil, and in fact some old farming texts made a point of recommending allowing clean soils to be eaten by the very young animals. Obviously it's not recommended to use a farmed area's soil, though, and it'd be wise to be sure of the soil's origin.
Quote:
For a while we were able to buy pasteurized homogenized cow milk at a greatly reduced rate to feed our kids. According to you, they all should have died but they did great on it.

It's according to scientific studies which were initially conducted trying to prove that cooked milk, or pasteurized milk, was just as good as raw milk. The infants fed that milk died. The problem with cooked milk is lack of probiotics, basically. A lamb or kid that's had an initial dose of probiotics can tolerate cooked milk later on, but if the first feed and those thereafter contain no probiotics, and the infant doesn't get them from any other source either, this is where the issues arise.

If the infants get the probiotics from another source there is a decent chance they'll live, but obviously they require an initial dose of them. My question is where these kids you speak of got their probiotics. I haven't heard of any kid or lamb that has not received any probiotics surviving, and all the pasteurized milk formulas I have heard of contain probiotics. But they can be obtained from other sources.

Best wishes to all.

 

[cassie]

It has been a few years since I sold my goats so my memory on temperatures is a little foggy. To heat treat colostrum it is heated to 140 degrees and held at that temperature for an hour. It takes that long to kill the CAE virus. Above 140 the antibodies in the colostrum are destroyed. Plus it will turn to pudding. I am sure about the one hour. I am not positive about the 140. It could be 135. Try googling CAE prevention prototcol for goats to get the exact parameters. As for probiotics, I on occasion used them. I bought a non-medicated calf stress powder that had probiiotics, electrolytes, and vitamins added. It was added to the milk. I forget who made it but it came in a gallon plastic jug and it was very affordable. Calva maybe? My vet clinic also offered a probiotic powder. The large dairy I mentioned did not use probiotics. That was back in the 1970's and we never heard of probiotics then. I will say this. What the books tell you will happen and what actually happens out in the field is often not the same thing. And the experience of people raising kids by the each and people raising kids by the hundreds is not the same. The formula I gave with the store milk, buttermilk and evap was concocted by either a Boer goat or mini goat breeder. I never knew which. I found it on a goat forum and a lot of posters raved about it. All kids seem to do very well on it but it is probably more important to use something like that for Boers and minis because their mothers tend to produce a richer milk than the average dairy goat. Most of the time my kids just got plain milk, sometimes with probiotics, sometimes without. The goat milk was always pasteurized. If I was feeding cow milk it depended on what I had. It could be raw milk from my Jerseys or commercially produced pasteurized homogenized milk. The kids didn't care and they grew very well on both. A goat dairy not far from me and much larger than mine, fed their kids half pasteurized goat milk and half milk replacer. They said by mixing the replacer half and half with milk greatly cut the risk of bloat. They fed their kids twice a day with a Lamb Bar and I know for a fact they lost very few kids.

 

[chooks4life]

Quote: No matter if nobody you knew had heard of them, since they exist in natural form in many things and you'd have to go to some lengths to ensure an animal had zero access to them. I have an old book from the early 1900s which speaks of probiotics and mentions that even older farming practices included allowing infants to obtain them from various sources. Louis Pasteur's experiments with pasteurizing revealed starkly and undeniably the requirement for probiotics in infant animal's diets.

Infants are not born with the probiotic population they require to survive, so all these kids you speak of definitely obtained probiotics from somewhere, and it wasn't the pasteurized milk. I'm thinking perhaps the evaporated milk you referred to is raw. (?)

If the lambs/kids weren't kept in sterile artificial surrounds there's every chance they were obtaining probiotics naturally from some place even if they didn't receive them in feed. Even saliva exchange with an older animal can give a young creature the gastrointestinal microflora and fauna necessary for life. If the animal is desperate enough, fecal matter can supply them, though it would most likely sicken them as well. Many foods and things we think of as non-foods or poor foods contain probiotics and/or prebiotics. Hay for example contains prebiotics, so if a young animal has a very low population of probiotics, eating hay can bolster the numbers and fully populate their gut. So, one mouthful of colostrum combined with subsequent consumption of hay, with pasteurized milk as the main feed item, would still grow the probiotic population until a sufficient colony was established which would enable the animal to grow on a cooked milk diet thereafter.
Quote: I know, and I have both 'book experience' and practical experience, though I'm no expert. I'm just trying to offer the thread starter the most correct information I know of, not denigrate anyone else's experiences or info. There are many methods to achieve something. I haven't run a large dairy but have known people who have, and I'm just relating what I have found is true and have been told is true, as you are.
Quote: All the feed regimes you mention here involve the animals being given probiotics at some point, whether added back to cooked milk, or naturally present in raw milk.

My point has been that they require at least some probiotics at some point in their young lives to survive, which I have been pointing out for the thread starter's benefit because your first post here did not sound like probiotics were fed; but as I said, I am now thinking maybe the evaporated milk was raw, as in dried at a low temperature and thus retaining probiotics. I was concerned someone might misconstrue your very first post and think normal store-bought milk will sustain a lamb or kid from its first week onwards with no mention of the necessity of probiotics, so I felt the need to point out that it will only work if the infant in question has first taken in probiotics from some source.

This has raised another question, and I think the answer to it will explain a point of confusion; have you ever raised an infant from birth onwards, without it having received even a sip of colostrum, on entirely pasteurized milk alone, without replacer or probiotics or any other additives? Your first post in this thread gave me that impression, which I have been under since then. But maybe it's not what you meant. It was the following which led me to that perhaps incorrect conclusion:
Quote: ...If you have just a kid or two, do not bother with replacer. They do much better on plain whole milk from the store...

...Take a jug of whole milk from the store. Pour off about a quart. Add a can of evaporated (not condensed) milk and a cup of buttermilk to the jug and shake. Add enough of the milk you poured off to fill the jug back up to the top.
Best wishes to all.