The debate about whether or not to bottle feed baby goats is about as
heated as the breast-fed vs. formula debate with human babies. Many goat
owners get all ruffled up over the idea of baby goats being bottle fed.
They cry that it is not "natural" and that the baby goats won't learn
how to be a goat if they aren't dam-raised. As if nature has all the
answers - Puh-leeze! Nature's ideas for taking care of animals include
disease, starvation, natural disasters, and predators. If you are trying
to raise goats in a farm type setting, then nature really doesn't have
much of a place. The moment you put that goat in captivity and bred it
for your own purposes, you made nature take a back seat. So then relying
on nature to take care of your baby goats is a double-edge sword. You
can't have it both ways.
The argument that baby goats won't
learn how to be a goat if they are bottle fed is total crap. Goats don't
need to "learn" how to be a goat; they are born KNOWING how to be a
goat. That's like saying raising a duck with a bunch of chickens means
the duck won't learn how to swim. Throw the duck in a pond and sure
enough, he will swim just fine. Nobody needed to teach him how to be a
duck. Just like no one needs to teach a goat how to be a goat -- they
already know how to be goats. Maybe people that are afraid their goats
won't learn to be goats are actually raising sheep and wondering why all
their "goats" run around like idiots and make wool.
People like
to get their spittle up about how "dangerous" bottle feeding can be.
WTF?! Obviously I missed the YouTube tutorial on "How to improperly feed
a goat with a bottle" because I have never lost a kid purely due to
bottle feeding. Sure, I have lost my fair share of baby goats due to
things like coccidiosis and enterotoxemia, but I have never lost one
solely due to the dangers of a soda bottle full of milk with a soft
rubber nipple on top. That's is crazy talk... Meanwhile, I have heard of
kids being killed due to dam-raising. This is a dirty little secret
that the teat-lovers don't like to talk about when the bottle vs. teat
debate springs up. Want to know the killer secret? --- IT'S CALLED CAE,
PEOPLE! Kid goats can die from CAE virus transmission due to being
allowed to nurse on mom. You can stop CAE virus transmission by (gasp!)
BOTTLE FEEDING! Yep, that's right. The "unnatural", "time-consuming" and
"dangerous" practice of bottle feeding can actually save the lives of
your little caprine kiddies. Take a newborn kid from a CAE infected mom
and bottle feed that kid pasteurized milk -- Viola! = Uninfected kid.
How many kids each year are infected by their mommas and sentenced to
die due to someone's aversion to bottle feeding? How many adult goats
get the axe because they are infected when they could have been saved by
someone taking the time to do CAE prevention? It's something to think
about, isn't it?
The other argument is that dam-raising is
soooooo much easier than bottle feeding. NOT IN MY OPINION! Sure, bottle
feeding does require that I commit to being at the farm to feed the
kids a couple of times a day, everyday for a few months. But what I lose
in time spent bottle feeding, I gain in time not spent chasing
half-wild kids around just to trim their hooves or time spent trying to
wean them from mom after 8 months. There's nothing like your yearling
doe still nursing on mom as she tries to push the next batch of kiddos
out her whoo-ha. You can't tell me that situation isn't a huge time-suck
when you have to deal with it.
Bottle raised kids are more
friendly because they look at humans as a source of food and comfort.
Dam-raised kids do not associate humans with those things. They may be
"friendly" but that is only because they are tame. They are never going
to have the same relationship with a human as they have with their dam.
Bottle feeding produces a psychological bond in the kid goat's brain
that forever links them with humans. If you want to test this theory
just take a bottle fed kid and a dam-raised kid and put them in a
pasture together for 4 months and don't let them have contact with
humans during that time. Then after 4 months go into the pasture and try
to catch them. The bottle baby will come running up to you like you
were never gone. Meanwhile the dam-raised kid will be in the opposite
corner of the pasture trying to scale the fence to get away from you.
Even if both kids were "friendly" when you left them, they both won't be
like that when you come back. Bottle raised kids are more friendly
towards humans. Period. End of story.
I personally think all
those people who claim dam-raised kids are just as nice as bottle raised
are not raising dairy goats. Dairy goats are like dairy cows, so over
bred for milk production that they are high-strung and crazy. The same
genes that control milk overproduction must also control adrenaline
overproduction. I have never met a dairy goat that wasn't just a little
keyed-up all the time. Meat goats, on the other hand, are like beef
cows. Nothing phases them and they just go with the flow. You have to
try hard to get a reaction out of a meat goat. Maybe it's all the blobs
of fat and meat that clog up their ability to go all cuckoo-bananas when
humans come into their pens. Maybe they just know they are big and slow
and don't care what it is we are going to try to do to them because
they are going to win by brute force and awkwardness every time. I can
totally believe a meat goat producer when they say you don't need to
bottle feed to make those goats friendly. Meat goats are a normally
friendly bunch of animals. But don't get all up in my grill when I say
that dairy goats need to be bottle fed in order to make them manageable.
There's a big difference between the two types of goats and some people
just need to accept that.
So, if you are contemplating bottle
feeding your baby goats, please don't let the dam-raised group put you
off of the idea. Bottle feeding is a perfectly fine practice that people
have been doing for as long as they have been domesticating goats.
