I did not want to pen breed my does this year but I think I am going to have to. I don't have the space to keep my goats at my house so they have to stay at a friends property about 1/2 mi. away. I am finding it hard to catch my girls in standing heat because I can't be over there all the time and keep a close eye on them. I decided today that it would just be easiest to put one doe in the pen with him and let him breed her when the time comes. The only problem I have is I do not like the fact that I am not 100% sure of the date she will be bred so won't know the exact due date. I like to know the date they are bred for other reasons to like being able to give them their pre kidding shots.
I was wondering, for those of you who pen breed, how you keep track of when your doe is being bred? I put my doe in with the buck today( 8/22) and want to keep her in their until she is bred. I just need to figure out what to look for other than actually seeing them breed. I don't believe my doe was in heat when I put her in with him but he was chasing her up and down the pen for a little bit making all kind of bucky noises.
Hope some of you can help me out! :)
- Nick
Replies
I will have a pretty close idea of when they are bred. In about a month I will pull blood and if they are bred I will know they are due right after Valentines day.
It is entirely possible that you won't see them breed. The thing I hate about pen breeding is that I usually have no idea when a doe is due. I only see about 1 in 3 actually get bred.
I hope so. I will see what happens in the next day or so.
If you know she came into heat yesterday, then she's probably just not ready to stand yet. :) YAY!!
I see discharge, not sure if it is semen. He has been with the does since I started this thread so he should be able to breed her at the appropriate time. Like I said she just came into heat yesterday, so could she just not be there yet or do they usually stand right away?
Both of my first time breeders last year stood for the buck just fine, so if she didn't stand for him, it would be my vote that you may have missed the standing part of her heat. When my first time breedings happened, there wasn't any doubt that it did, and the does continued to show interest in the buck. (similar to how you described the successful breeding you witnessed) There IS a chance that the breeding happened prior to you getting there, as you mentioned. On all of my does, there is some semen leakage out of the doe's vulva for the next day or so... do you see anything like that?
Update on my 2013 breeding season:
Well, after a couple cool days, both my does came into heat. Yes, I was wrong. I am sorry for slightly arguing with you all. I just needed to see it all for myself and now I have. I went over to the goats on the 17th and both were in obvious heat. They both had discharge, and were swollen around their vulva. One doe was very intersted in the buck but I didn't see him really mount her. He just kept rubbing up on her. I suspected they were doing the deed before I had arrived. The other doe was swollen and ha discharge but wouldn't stand for the buck. She is a about 17 months old and has never been pregnant before. She was tooken to a buck last Jan. but didn't settle. Anyway when I went over there this morning the yearling was even more swollen, and "open", but still wasn't standing. The other doe was still interested in the buck but she kept walking in a circle when he would smell her.. So I decided to hold her collar and see if he would mount her, which he did. She didn't try to get away from him and let him breed her and when he was done she arched her back up so I think it was successful. I am worried about the other doe though.. Could she be scared of bucks or has she just not gotten far enough into her cycle?
It sounds like you think everything with goats has a right and wrong answer. How I wish that were true! But alas, the answers change from year to year and goat to goat. Just as you got lucky with your first kidding, I got lucky with my first breeding season. All three of my does came into obvious heats the first week of October, and I thought, well, that was easy. But the second year I learned that not all goats are that obvious, and sometimes they are much louder one month than another. Some years I've been able to do off-season breedings, and some years I have not. After successfully breeding a doe for kidding last fall and two for kidding two years ago in fall, I got over-confident and planned to breed six for fall this year. As I said in a previous post, I have not seen a doe in heat since March. I normally have some does kidding in January, but looks like the 2014 kidding season will start later than ever before. Starting in August, I normally breed every doe that I see in heat ... some get bred in August, some in September, some in October, and so on. Bottom line is that you can't say that anything about goats is engraved in stone. The first few years we had goats, it drove us crazy, but now we just roll with it.
If someone says all of their goats will kid in a certain month, they could be using hormones to make them come into heat. Some breeders do that.
If your goats are always half a mile from you, I see some long, cold nights in the barn in your future, or kids with hypothermia. I don't even remember how many nights we spent in the barn the first few years we had goats. And even then, we had a kid almost die from hypothermia the second kidding season. She appeared lifeless when we found her, but my daughter insisted that she could feel a heart beat, so we put her in warm water, and she came back.
Rolling Hills Nigerians said:
Also living in the Pacific Northwest, specifically southwest Washington, I have considered a winter birth but am more inclined to not. While our weather is not usually cold, we do get those few days when it can be brutal, into the 20s, and if that is when the doe kids, it can be tragic. Heat lamps will not be of significant help during one of those cold snaps when the kids are laying there newly born and wet. My girls are currently living on my enclosed patio attached to the garage (attached to the house), and I would *not* be comfortable with them kidding during one of those unusual cold snaps. My junior doe showed me this April how fast it can happen - one-half hour from start to finish (all three babies cleaned and dried) with no indication 15 minutes before it was going to happen (and she only hollered *once* so a baby monitor would have been useless). She kidded on Day 140.
With all that said, I will point out that in the first half of January, we have had several severe winter spells; 1979 and 1980 come to mind specifically that lasted more than a week in the 20s, unusual but brutal for our relatively mild climate. Based on my 50-year history in this area, I would not want a December through February kidding, or even mid-November through February.
Just my thoughts.
Breeding for January fits into rut season here in Oregon. Rut season (and when most does go into heat in other breeds) is in the fall, and if you have friends that have bred for Jan. kiddings, it's most likely because they have does that have gone into heat at the VERY start of the breeding season. What Deb is saying, is that even though people HAVE bred "out of season" she personally has not had good luck with it. At least not dependably. She likes to kid in the fall, because of the worm/parasite season in her area, and the fact that fall kidding helps her manage parasites through a form of prevention so to speak.
What I was saying, is that I have noticed Deb's experience to be true for myself. My does do not display signs of heat (or at least they haven't yet) for me "out of season" meaning they haven't shown signs of heat in the winter/spring to make for a fall kidding. I also mention that my ONE doe that has gone into heat right NOW, is the ONLY one I have that has so far. I think that has to do with it being early in the rut season.
The reason I was sharing this with you, is because you MIGHT find that your does aren't coming into heat this early in the season. That's all I was saying.
-
1
-
2
of 2 Next