My doe will be due soon and since this is her first as well as mine I want to make sure I'm there to help and/or root for her if necessary. Also I'd just like to watch babies get born :).
I know many of the signs of labor: Belly dropping, full udder, fully relaxed tail ligaments, and sometimes mucus discharge.
What I want to know is, is there a way I can look at or feel my doe to know that she is NOT going to have babies in the next 6 to 12 hour, and how soon after said labor show up should I move her to the kidding pen.
I only have 2 does so I only want them separated for when she's in active labor, kidding, (if all is well) shortly after kidding, etc.
My main reason is so I can turn her in at night and know that she won't have them in the night.
Odd tips and tricks are welcome! :)
Replies
Wow! okay she's still far from that point.
Right now she just has a tiny little bit of crust.
I took this picture 2 days ago. You can see the little crusty on her vulva. It has been falling off and coming back a little bit bigger than the previous day.
As excited as I am I'd rather she gives birth on or after her due date than run the risk of her having premature babies that don't make it.
The author of that blog makes a common mistake, assuming that humans have a mucus plug, so goats do too. But they don't. They just have mucus. I'm sure you're really, really excited about your goat kidding. It took us about 3-4 years to stop wishing our goats into labor. The down side of doing that was that we'd convince ourselves something was wrong when our goat wasn't even in labor. The pic below is the kind of mucus that means a goat is going to kid very soon. Small bits of mucus like the pictures in the blog you linked could mean the doe is going to kid in twenty minutes or two weeks. Small bits of mucus are so unpredictable that I completely ignore them. When I see mucus like in this picture, I don't leave the barn. But in many births, you don't see mucus, which is why I don't normally mention it when talking about signs of labor.
Cherissa Woudenberg said:
I learned about the mucus plug thing from this: https://edenhills.wordpress.com/2011/03/01/a-couple-of-goat-pregnan...
It could be it's not actually a mucus plug, but just the first bit of mucus discharge.
Well she's on day 138, she has lost her mucus plug, and I've noticed her ligaments getting soft and spongy. Not yet broken. ;)
I have the kidding pen all set up. Do does ever have kids as early as 140 days?
I typed in the day she was with the buck into a goats gestation calculator and it said her due date is the 23 of march.
The calculator I used had a special setting for mini breeds and it showed a 5 day difference between the two (the due dates of the mini's were 5 days sooner than the standard's, 145 for mini's 150 for standard's). Just wondering how closely should I trust these dates? and is there really a difference?
I'm really wishing there was a fool proof way of knowing exactly when those babies were coming. I'm waiting on a FF to deliver right now. Needless to say, I haven't been sleeping real well lately. Too afraid of missing it, and with the weather so cold and the fact that her mom has triplets as a rule, I really want to be there. She's at day 149 today, and seems really close. Ligs are so gone, hubby said she felt "broken and squishy", lol.
I'd suggest putting both does inside every night until they kid to be safe. Being your first time, I wouldn't risk missing something, especially if the weather is not absolutely perfect. I bring goats into the barn when they're around 140 days pregnant.