Bummer! All bucks!

[Cygnet]

Was trying to get one last doeling out of a 9+ year old Nigerian doe. Tonight she had triplets, all bucks. BOO! I'd been hoping for at least one doeling out of her. (I lost all my other adult does last summer to dogs. She was the herd matriarch and I was hoping for a doeling from her to start over with.)

One was also a stillbirth that was obviously "wrong" and had been dead for a good long while. It had no eyes and a cleft palate and some other abnormalities. No palpable testes, but the plumbing was male. I didn't do a necropsy beyond just checking it over to make sure it was all there and I didn't need to go fishing for dead kid bits, kwim?

Sigh.

The surviving bucklings are tiny little guys and they appear to be a few days premature. I'm not sure if they're tiny because they were sharing a womb with a dead kid, or if their size and the stillbirth are due to mama's age. They look like preemies, but I don't think they actually are -- I had mama pegged for Christmas kids, so they're actually about four days late.

I think one will make it. I am not sure about the smaller one, though -- he's bright and alert and walking, but has NO body fat at all, and is so very tiny.

Mama's obviously on antibiotics. Do the kids need to be on antibiotics too because of the dead one?

(And how in the world do you figure out the antibiotic dosage on a goat kid the size of a My Little Pony?)

-- Leva

[Vicki McGaugh TX Nubians]

No antibiotics for the kid, but I would jacket him, a sweatshirt sleeve with the belly cut out works great. Keep her milked so she cleans well, she certainly at 9 should have more milk than one little guy can drink and you want her to have plenty of milk for him.

Have you though about simply rebreeding her this first heat in 8 weeks? As long as she is in excellent health she should do fine. Then pray for a doeling or 2.

When doe age so do their eggs, most of the abnormal kids you will see like what you had will be from these aged eggs. Vicki

[Cygnet]

Thanks Vicki. They're in a dog house at the moment and it's a nice warm temperature in there. Mama is also a very good mama and is curled up with them. I'm worried if I put anything on them, she'd remove it ... she's horrible about chewing and is fascinated with cloth. So I'm just trying to keep their environment reasonably warm ...

I'm planning on rebreeding her as early in the summer as she'll take. Breeding her now gives us May kids, and in Arizona, that's not a good idea. It can be well over 100 degrees here in May ... :-) I'll shoot for October kids.

Am I right in suspecting some form of trisomy or deletion, then, with the rather dramatic degree of deformities?

I am going to milk her ... she makes so much milk she gets uncomfortable if I don't. (Passed that on to her daughters, too, dangit.)

[Vicki McGaugh TX Nubians]

Add shizims and cyclops, and since does can selectively abort and start absorbing kids when they want to (change in nutrition or they deem the kid unsurvivabale) when kids are being decomposed and absorbed you can get what appears to be deformities. Earlier in the pregnancy and you can have at term kids that are a complete slurry with just soft bones and slurried skin left, or mummies, leathery skin that if you pry open contains small round bones that haven't had the calcium absorbed yet.

For myself it has been when extra teats or parrot mouth rears it's ugly head....in nubians, both traits of where we came from. vicki

[Cygnet]

Thanks Vicki.

What's a shizims? *feeling dumb*

I would guesstimate this kid was dead days and not longer than that. "Good long while" was dead for a few days, not dying during labor or at birth, I should clarify that.

There was no rigor mortis, but he looked close to full term -- had a full coat of hair, and he was twice the size of the surviving kids. Wasn't really starting to decompose, though I checked for missing parts out of pure habit and because I initially wasn't sure "how dead" the dead kid was.

Now that I think about it, he was probably hydrocephalic because the head was out of proportion to the body size (and it was a BIG kid.) Probably a good thing this happened with a nine year old doe with a bunch of kiddings before this one or we might have had a much bigger tragedy here.

My reaction was, "Ugggg!" and to throw it in the trash. Now (and this shows how morbid and analytically minded I am) I'm kinda wishing I'd kept it. Trash day's today, unfortunately.

Thinking about it ... chain of events may have been, doe had a fetus with (genetic?) issues. For whatever reason (possibly also genetically based) it was robbing nutrients from the others, who were healthy. This caused it to grow large, and for the other kids to be stunted and somewhat premature despite being "full term" by my calendar. Then it died just before birth, leaving two surviving kids who are very tiny but apparently viable.

(The smaller one is more vigorous than the big one and was bouncing around the doghouse this morning. I am amazed at biology sometimes ... this kid literally comes up to the fetlocks on my 200 pound alpine pack goat.)

It'll be interesting to see if these two "catch up" and reach their full genetic potential, or if they stay stunted.

[Vicki McGaugh TX Nubians]

Shizim without looking up my awful spelling is several legs, two heads and one body.

Yep I could not have thrown it away until everyone saw it and I had studied it Vicki

[Cygnet]

Ah. re: several legs -- I've seen that in fetal chicks occasionally.

It's funny -- I had no problems opening dud eggs (though occasionally I wished for a gas mask) and studying the fetal chick to see why it didn't hatch. I used to have a quart jar full of alcohol and interesting examples of how cell division could go very wrong.

But goat kids? Are a different story for me ... aaaauuugh! Trauma! It's deformed!

Sigh. I really shouldn't be so squeamish.

[luvzmybabz]

I wonder if the large vs. small is similiar to twin to twin transfusion in humans. The doctors got a little worried with my sisters twins but then they evened out mostly however the larger at birth is still about 3 inches taller.

And I would like to question the lack of pictures on this thread.

Well I am hoping for doelings out of the 2 girls set to go first ( bought bred) but Sugar I would really love at least 1 buckling as my buck did not make it through thte last crazy OKlahoma freeze 70 one day frezzing the next and did not get above freezing for 4 days my herd queen was in with him for the month proceeding so I will be testing and praying for a buckling.

[Cygnet]

Luvz, I have no photos because my digital camera charger is missing. I've griped about that on multiple recent posts. It's $40 to replace it, though at this point, I'm tempted to cough up the money.

There are also a few folks on the board who know me (or my BF) personally ... I'm not anonymous and I'm not making anything up. And I'm posting under what is effectively a "real identity" -- Cygnet is not my real surname but I use it so often I get postal mail addressed to it. And, if you google it, you turn up about a ten year history of my life online. I am confident in my respectibility online, and use the same handle everywhere.

(I quit using my real surname online after someone called my mom out of the phone book IRL to try to get my real life phone number.)

I've got tomorrow off. I'll tear apart my house again and see if I can't find that #$%#$ charger and get some pics of the live kids.

-- Leva

[Vicki McGaugh TX Nubians]

Well I am also not the picture taking fanatic of some either, so know exactly what you mean vicki

[manygoatsnmore]

And some of us have never taken the time to master posting pics of our animals...

I had a case a few years ago where I had an Alpine doe with trips - 2 small, stillborn doelings and a HUGE buck kid. In doing some research, IIRC, I found info that selenium or iodine deficiency could cause this. I think selenium, offhand. I guess I'll have to go Google and see if I can find the info again, and if it has to do with the sex of the kids (as in only happens with small, stillborn does and live huge bucks or vice-versa, and if it can happen that the little bucks live and the large doe dies, etc). Vickie, I think you may(?) have been one of the folks that gave me info on it? If so, please jump in with more info? Thanks.