Just Kidding…

That’s ‘Little Buddy’ in the blog pic.  He was born to ‘Ginger’, hence the Gilligan’s Island theme.  Buddy, as we call him, was 10 days premature.  His brother was still born.  We had to do some goat intensive care for Buddy.  Initially his body temperature was dropping fast.  And he wouldn’t eat.  Not that it would have mattered, when the kids body temperature gets too low, they go into shock, and the milk could kill him.  This is because his body would divert resources to digesting the milk.  Or that the milk would go undigested which could be as bad or worse due to toxins that may be a result of the milk not being metabolized.  So we put him in a warm bath.  Got his temp back up.  And fed him a couple ounces.  Rinse, wash, repeat.. until about 2am, when we managed to get a gram or two of probiotics into him, and he had drank about 4 ounces of colostrum.  We put him in a laundry basket with a heating pad on low and some blankets.  And by 6am he was up and ready to eat.  Another 4 ounces of colostrum, and he was doing much better.  We kept him in the house for 4 days, feeding him every 2-3 hours a couple ounces at a time.  When he was born his dam rejected him.  This is natural because she apparently felt he was not viable.  And he wasn’t.  But after a few days of hand feeding, we took him back out to the barn to nurse on Ginger.  Fully expecting that she would reject him again.  And she did, at first.  But when we had her in the stanchion milking, we let Buddy nurse.  And pretty quickly she came around.  Long story short, Lil’Buddy and Ginger are both doing great.

On a slightly different point.  All of this begs the question of why save a buck kid that was premature.  Its a difficult question, and one that largely goes unanswered except in farm circles.  Because this is a fact of life in farming, some animals need to be culled.  Especially when you have a dairy.  The bucks have no real relation to the bottom line.  So it would have been very easy to have just let nature take its course in this particular case.  And the reality is that we talked about that.  But for me, right now, its more important to understand how to save a life, than it is to let one go.  Had this been a doe kid, and not a buckling, the impetus to save that life would have been very high.

It might not be wise to write about this kind of thing.  Most likely folks probably want to hear about the idyllic farm life.  But this is the reality of farm life, farmers have to do emotionally difficult things every day.  And they choose to continue to do it.  Sometimes its because of the ‘bottom line’, and sometimes its to learn, and sometimes its just because I value life.  And that’s all I have to say about that… today.