The gate episode actually ended with a win. I did get them in, and after that I kept Mozilla and Dawn at home, by strategically keeping certain gates shut so they couldn’t get to any possible escape routes.
Dawn, who also came from a good Toggenburg / Nubian line, has always been a very skinny goat – bred to “put it all in the bucket”, as the saying goes. She was bred here, out of a good milking line, and she was always a mystery because at rising 6 years old she had never turned up with a live kid.
In the old days I used to hand-mate my does and knew pretty exactly when they were due. Most often I was there when they kidded, either in the sheds or in one of my small yards – but again that wasn’t possible for 6 years at least. All I knew about Dawn was that I would see her in kid and then see her obviously kidded but alone. I wasn’t sure even if she was carrying full term or aborting – until the winter of 2005 when I found her doe kid dead in a fence line – full term, cleaned up but apparently unfed. That upset me greatly and when I saw Dawn in November 2006 well in kid I brought her and Moz down into a secure paddock and kept an eye on her as best I could. As her time grew really close I locked her into one of my sheds – carrying food and water and checking twice a day until I felt the tendons drop, and I knew she was somewhere between 24 and 48 hours off.
By the time she kidded at about 3.30pm on New Year’s Eve day I was checking hourly – and soon discovered my suspicions were correct: Dawn refused to have her udder touched – no doubt due to tenderness. The kid was a cute, hungry little female and I brought her into the house, gave her a quick bath, dried her up and put her in a big cardboard box for my mom to “watch over”. Then I went back and did battle with Dawn – tying her up tight and getting my hands thoroughly stamped on – but better me than the kid. For four or five days I carried on milking. Meantime, I’d bought some milk replacement powder and new lamb teats, dug out my old feeding bottles and got geared up to rear the kid and gradually dry off the mother.
The biggest drawback was having only one kid on its own. I didn’t want her in the house all the time, but there was nowhere I could put her alone – and putting her out in the paddock at that age just wasn’t on without the mother’s care. So I rang a local breeder of Boer crossbreds and asked if he happened to have a surplus late kid. Christmas is REALLY late. I knew I was asking for a miracle – and he didn’t have one. But since I was thinking of getting a small herd going again to cope with my gorse, I said I’d go look at his weaners once he got them yarded.
On New Year’s Day he rang me and I went over that evening. The first kid he pointed out to me was the youngest in the yard. Her leg had just been broken in the muster and he’d set it in bamboo splints. She was putting a bit of weight on it allright, and we could both see she would be better off with some TLC rather than running in the mob with her mother. Though she was a little bit older, she was about the same size as Eve – just a little more thick-set. She was lovely. I got my miracle and she got her TLC and took to the bottle well. I named her Sunshine.
I bought a roll of netting and put up a temporary pen for Eve and Sunshine on the lawn outside the front of the house, where I could see them from my pc. I gave them a couple of sawn-off tree rings to jump on and fitted them out with a little shelter. They were out of my hair and for some days they only came indoors at night.
Then they found out how to knock the fence down. My best option was to move them to a sizeable kid shed further away over the drive and opposite the house. I had a bit of work ahead of me in rearing them but I was delighted to have kids on the farm again.
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