Our second kidding of the 2014 season was on April 6th, and this one went just the way I like it. I got to the barn in the morning and Hermione had a gorgeous black and white spotted doeling already standing, nursing, and mostly dry.
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Hermione's gorgeous spotted doeling |
I managed to get the doeling dried some more, and purposefully got some birthing fluids on my hands. I let Hermione sniff my hands and she started licking them clean, which is what I wanted to happen. She was almost impossible to catch before kidding, and this way she thought I was one of her kids and has become easier to catch. She behaves well on the milk stand, has very nice teats with large orifices, and her milk is high butterfat and sweet. She has a forever home here, that's for sure.
Then on April 9th the roller coaster went back downhill and we had a very difficult kidding for our doe Lilly. She had triplet bucklings, but the first two were trying to make their entrance into the world at the same time. I didn't realize it until I started helping, pulling on feet when Lilly pushed. After a good bit of this, I realized I had one front foot and one back foot. So either we had a kid trying to come out sideways, or we had two different kids. I tried to push the hind foot back in and get the front foot kid out, but couldn't. So I pushed the front foot kid back, and went in looking for another hind foot. I finally found it, and got the first kid out breech. Then the front-foot kid started to present, and came out relatively easily. Then the third kid was breech, and huge, and stuck in the birth canal. I was really afraid I was looking at an emergency C-section to get it out, but with some wiggling him around and getting feet out, Lilly and I managed to get him born. He was a monster, 8 lbs at birth, and a gorgeous black and sable color.
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Newborn triplet bucklings, still wet and still haven't eaten |
Lilly was in bad shape after the kidding, though. She was bleeding bright red blood from her vagina, and she was lying down grunting. Sadly, I had to put her down because she had torn internally and was bleeding out. Her black buckling died sometime in the night. He never stood unassisted and he never ate. Then I had to make an even more difficult choice. Lilly was CAE positive, which is a disease kids can get from their dams from milk, or sometimes even en utero. So the two surviving bucklings were a liability, possibly CAE positive, and having to be bottle fed. I chose to euthanize both of them rather than risk them passing CAE off to the other goats in the herd.
And that's all the time I have for kidding stories today. More soon!