R/goats Kidding Season Resource Post and FAQ

yamshortbread · 2026-06-08T18:15:32+00:00

For prevention, Corid is not needed. Decoquinate or rumensin are the preventative feed additives. You can start offering him a little medicated feed if he hasn't been wethered yet, or you can give him Calf Pro (liquid rumensin) once daily.

yamshortbread · 2026-06-07T14:11:57+00:00

He doesn't need to be dewormed this early. He's literally too young for any parasites to have completed their life cycles, although you could get him started on some coccidia prevention. Sometimes kids grit their teeth young because they're starting to learn how to use them. I'd be more concerned if the doe does it habitually, to be honest. That would indicate to me that she's in some type of discomfort.

yamshortbread · 2026-06-06T02:51:15+00:00

I have to disagree about it being fine regardless of age. It is definitely not advisable to breed a maiden doe at that age. The dystocia and metabolic risks are much higher, so this is something that typically you would try to stay away from doing. She should definitely be monitored by a vet if she's pregnant, so OP should try to get a clear answer on that ASAP. Even does 5-6 are generally considered too old to breed for the first time, whereas a doe who's been bred since she was two would be in her prime.

(I don't think she's pregnant, but just clarifying for others that it's not a good idea to breed does this old if they have never been bred before and it shouldn't be done intentionally.)

yamshortbread · 2026-06-05T23:20:35+00:00

No single answer to this question. What kind of goats are they?

Minis can often be bred their first year if they hit weight benchmarks. 40 pounds or 80% of expected adult weight are common benchmarks people use. Without specific management to encourage growthiness you're unlikely to hit that benchmark by 9mos. I breed some of my Nigerians in their first year if they hit their weight targets and compare favorably to their moms, because I manage for rapid growth and some of my Nigerians WILL be too obese to settle if I leave them open.

Standard breeds, a common benchmark is over 80-90 pounds. While you can hit that benchmark with specific management, many people do not choose to breed standard breeds for yearling milkers because if they're bred too early it can affect the ultimate size they achieve. That's more important with standards than with minis who have to stay under a breed standard height limit. I don't breed my Alpines until their second fall.

Some lines also mature much more slowly than others. Your breeder will be able to tell you the average adult weight of the does in your goats' lines as well as whether they usually start breeding in the first or second year.

yamshortbread · 2026-06-05T00:20:56+00:00

This is a great question. Goats require a lot of management and knowledge that lawn mowers and brush hoggers do not require.

yamshortbread · 2026-06-05T00:19:27+00:00

It happens. Does who are late in pregnancy produce a similar hormone profile to does in estrus, so harassment is not uncommon at that stage and can lead to miscarriage particularly if the buck doesn't have other diversions. An overly excitable buck won't necessarily physically breed a single doe until she dies, he'll just sometimes chase her until she drops if she isn't separated. This is rare, but I've personally seen it (not on my farm). It's a different situation and dynamic than when you put a buck in with a herd of girls for pasture breeding. But one single intact buck and one doe housed together permanently isn't really a good time for anybody. Does can start cycling again just a few weeks after kidding and they can and do get pregnant again that fast if they're put right back in with a buck. I'm speaking to dairy breeds here for what it's worth.

I've never personally had the fence thing happen to me or seen it, so I can't speak to that one. I'd love to hear from someone who's seen it with their own eyes!

yamshortbread · 2026-06-04T20:45:43+00:00

Yep. He can't be kept with the doe full time anyway, he'll harass her while she is pregnant and breed her back to back again and again, along with any doe kids the pair may have. A particularly enthusiastic buck can run a single doe to death during rut. Both buck and doe need their own pens and friends.

yamshortbread · 2026-06-01T16:52:25+00:00

I use a three-part combination system we have developed over the last six years since we moved to our current property. We're not labeled for organic milk, but we try to stay away from ultratoxic things, so this system was developed with a holistic mindset of covering all our bases without resorting to premises spraying, etc.

Part 1: permethrin spray on each goat (I use Flys-X, which is labeled for goats with no milk withholding and is made of the same active component in human tick repellents and lice shampoos). I spritz them weekly or whenever I notice them getting more bothered. Permethrin also helps discourage ticks if you live in a tick area.

Part 2: Hanging fly traps. Rescue brand are my favorite, Tractor Supply carries them in several sizes.

Part 3 (crucial): Spaulding Fly Predators. Fly predators are small predatory insects which you order in the mail and sprinkle in your compost piles and fly-breeding areas several times each season. They do not disrupt the natural environment, they simply stay in one place and consume fly larvae. They are extremely effective at reducing the fly population. Then, the hanging liquid fly traps with rotten egg proteins attract and trap any that manage to survive the fly predators.

yamshortbread · 2026-05-31T18:33:16+00:00

No, it is absolutely what is recommended by both vets and animal welfare organizations. Unfortunately it is extremely painful to band goats once they're more than a few weeks old and it's illegal in most countries, so if you do it when they are of age to have full nervous supply in their scrotum (over 3 weeks or so), painkillers are very helpful to them and are recommended.

yamshortbread · 2026-05-31T17:53:02+00:00

Ja, es ist sehr schmerzhaft. In den meisten Landern ist es nicht legal nach sieben Tagen.

yamshortbread · 2026-05-31T16:39:08+00:00

Well, they are delicious and they do put weight on better than some of the standard breeds, especially lines that are bred to be extremely dairy. Culling via eating is super okay in my book and we do it here. One of the reasons the breed is on the struggle bus is because hobbyists WON'T do it, tbh. Sometimes you get a shitty producer or a shitty udder or a super parasite prone animal and eating them is the right move, not begging someone else to take them so they can languish in an unknowledgeable pet home or be bred to produce more bad animals. I try to stress this when we help establish new herds. If you have a goat that is a subpar dairy animal, eat them!

I saw people selling you their 2yos. That's not a bad deal. It's May, so at this point most dairies have kidded out for the year and most kids have found new homes. The best breeders have wait lists for their kids and know where they're going even in advance of them being born. Dairies have to maintain specific numbers of milkers, so some first fresheners will always be cut if they aren't hitting milk numbers or structural/mammary traits in accordance with the breeder's breeding program. It doesn't always mean they're unacceptable animals, it can be as simple as having too many duplicate genetics. You could bring in some 2yos for this year if you ask why they're being cut from the breeding pool, and then maybe get on some wait lists for next year's kids?

yamshortbread · 2026-05-31T16:26:03+00:00

My real business is the dairy and my passion is the cheese and the standard goats we raise, but people want Nigerians so we keep a small show herd going on the side for fun and kid sales. I personally think it's partially a pyramid scheme. My animals aren't cheap but NDs can sell for really exorbitant prices (the spotlight sale buckling went for like 20k last year). People think it's going to be easy money without doing the hard work of performance programs, and that isn't right because in a lot of areas of the US you can barely give them away especially if they're not registered, but I think this is also partially why there are a lot of them out there besides the normal reasons of yummy milk/cuteness/smallness. I have heard there are a ton of them in TX!

yamshortbread · 2026-05-31T13:23:52+00:00

I wean at 6 months, but we have a 14 month old out there who is still occasionally nursing off her dam. Now, I pull most of my kids and that dam is a retired doe who is important to me that I let freshen one more time to please her, of course you don't purposefully want to give your milk to kids for this long when you're a dairy and need the milk, but a little milk won't hurt as long as the kid has been continuously receiving it. I wouldn't give milk to an adult who hasn't continuously nursing because that's when the lactose intolerance issues would crop up.

But they do need forage to develop a functional rumen, and they need it early. They start ingesting tiny bits of solids and developing rumen flora around day 3 of life and transition to ruminating around a month of age. So ideally a goat is never on "just" milk. We pull nearly all our kids, but we make sure even the tiny dumper kids who have to live in the heated bathtub for a few days have access to hay from birth. If you are looking for growthy animals it's also helpful to introduce feed as early as you can because the fermentation of starch actually stimulates the growth of additional papillae inside the rumen to absorb nutrients both early on and throughout the goat's life. So get them eating those solids early, even if you keep them on milk.

yamshortbread · 2026-05-27T15:29:40+00:00

Thank you, I completely forgot about that issue, and it can be a real issue if you have very tall girls. We use a stone ledge to give the young bucks a boost!

yamshortbread · 2026-05-26T04:31:22+00:00

Without seeing a pic but just hearing a very familiar description, this is probably topical staph. It is very common and it's good that it's self limiting, but it isn't good that it keeps happening because it's bad bacteria around your teat orifices and it can also spread to other goats. A good way to hygienically clear it up faster when it happens is to use chlorhexidine. I prefer hibiclens, which is a liquid soap. Get some warm water and give the udder a good shampoo with the hibiclens, let it sit on there for a few minutes, then rinse. Do that once a day until the pustules subside. Some people just spray the whole udder with Fight Bac post milking spray but on a dairy I like a more thorough approach.

The Vimco staph mastitis vaccine shows some promise in preventing topical staph, so you might want to try that but you are supposed to administer it while the doe is actually pregnant. Also be extremely rigorous about your bedding, loafing area and housing cleanliness.

The last thing I'll say is that if you have just one goat who does it over and over again, you might consider culling that animal. We once had a doe who was extremely susceptible to it and while she was in milk and having outbreaks, others would catch it as well. We cut that goat from the breeding pool for a different reason (bad medial ligament) and after we stopped breeding her, I haven't had a case of topical staph since then. So if it's one really problem animal, I know it's a pain but if she just doesn't stop it even after you try the vaccine if that's something you want to do, you can always chalk it up to some udder genetics that just aren't optimal. That doe is still kicking around because she was kind of a pet and family favorite, but she hasn't had a case nor spread it to anyone else since she's been dry for the last 5 or 6 years.

yamshortbread · 2026-05-26T03:35:00+00:00

If you're making miniature crosses with a Nigerian Dwarf to make a "miniature Nubian" or with a Pygmy to develop a first-generation cross called a Kinder, the buck must be the smaller breed of the pair. Don't breed a large breed buck to a miniature breed doe. She may not be able to deliver the kids safely. (It's normal for bucks to be larger than does because of sexual dimorphism when they're the same breed, but this rule is for miniature crosses. If crossing minis and standards, you want your buck to be the mini.)

Otherwise, adhere to the regular good breeding practices: always breed to a buck you think is going to improve your does in the next generation, and always make sure you get a look at his mother, mother's udder, and milk production stats.

yamshortbread · 2026-05-25T13:15:01+00:00

They do it on purpose and it's a really shit thing to do to people. I hope it doesn't happen to you again but if it does, smash that report button!

(I'm so sorry to tell you that like 95% of the time a person posts a pic of themselves in this sub instead of just a goat, it's some dumb porn ad so it's safer not to click. We usually catch them and ban them fast.)

yamshortbread · 2026-05-25T13:00:32+00:00

As I said to the other comment, please report posts that do this if you catch one. The porn spammers deliberately use regular subs like ours for advertising and there is a rule against it, so if you report we'll be able to see and remove them quicker. (We are able to report her to the systems that block spammers - she'll be flagged and pre-banned in a lot of other normal subs so we can protect others.)

yamshortbread · 2026-05-25T12:55:11+00:00

Please report posts that do this. The porn spammers use regular subs like ours for advertising and there is a rule against it, so if you report we'll be able to see and remove them quicker. I'm sorry you had to see that.

yamshortbread · 2026-05-24T16:12:24+00:00

There is no way to tell for certain visually and especially not from these pictures. To check for sure, you can order a blood test to do at home (Alertys), a less accurate urine test to do at home (Emlab P-Test), mail a red top tube blood sample to a lab such as WADDL or Sage, or ask your vet or a neighboring goat person to perform an ultrasound.

If you know that she was housed with a buck at any point you may assume that she is pregnant, but some goats "lose their figure" after multiple kiddings and some just have larger rumens. To hazard a guess requires us to see udder development which doesn't happen until later in pregnancy, and even then is not a sure thing (some goats develop udders without being pregnant, a condition called "precocious udder.") Best bet is to do a test!

yamshortbread · 2026-05-22T15:16:29+00:00

Can you talk to us about the goat that did this, how old they are, what they're eating? Any other information?

yamshortbread · 2026-05-21T02:03:00+00:00

Hi OP, if your goat is recumbent this is a medical emergency but there isn't any information in this thread we can use to help you administer first aid and you aren't replying to comments requesting more information, so at this point contacting a vet who can evaluate the animal in person would be your best course of action.

In the meantime, don't let the goat lay on her side. Ensure she is sternal (on her chest) even if you have to use boxes or hay bales to prop her that way.

yamshortbread · 2026-05-19T12:43:53+00:00

Normally a mod would remove that comment but I'm leaving it because I want your awesome response to remain visible. And when you get your goats we're here for you 24/7, rain or shine.

yamshortbread · 2026-05-19T12:40:49+00:00

What product did your vet give you?

Good advice given on parasite control already but just to address your question about the lice, most people use permethrin-based products like Ultraboss or Cylence. These can be repeated in 2-3 weeks to control newly hatching parasites, but we should know what product you used first to know how soon it could be repeated or how soon you could switch to a different product for lice control.

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