I'm still not sure what light to put this in.
I had a rough kidding yesterday. With two other, uneventful kiddings as well. One was a doe I sold last year kidding for her new owners. It was perfect and their first time with a doe kidding.
I have been sick for a week and barely doing the minimum, with dad having to pick up the slack.
My 9 year old delivered her doe/buck twins with ease.
At the same time one of my 14 month old FFs was finally in labor. She'd been having trouble getting up for the past three days for some reason. She was a 75% Boer, 25% Nubian doe. Very well grown. Healthy. Bred to my new Boer buck. A daughter to the Boer buck I used for a little over one season.
Her first water broke and there were two hooves. Good, fine. But then they drew back and a second water broke and another hoof joined them. Shoot.
Fine. Go in, figure out which hooves go with which head. Kept pulling the head up but it would not come out. I kept aligning the kid and just as it would reach the pelvis, the head would tip back. I worked for a couple of hours. At one point pushing the first kid back and getting the second one lined up. Dad could not get his entire hand in at all.
The vet had been called an hour prior and they were headed south to treat a calf. We told the vet's office to call when they were headed back in case we needed them.
It was one of those gut feelings I had. The fact that everything was lined up right. I had the right head with the right body and still could not get the kid(s) out.
We don't call the vet often. This will make the third time for a kidding issue in 12 years. One of those times, I was in Kansas and dad just could not figure out what was going on. So he had to call in another vet. It has been three different vets each time. We've had trouble hanging onto large animal vets.
So the vet, a young woman who grew up on a Holstein dairy farm, gets here. The kids had still been alive earlier when I had checked, but we were going on 2 1/2+ hours since the water broke. She tried. Said I had the right legs with the right head. She couldn't get the kid through. Went through the same things I had been doing. Asked Joe, her vet assistant (who does a lot of the dirty work), to try. He could not get his hand through her pelvis.
At one point she said her uterus had just tore. So we considered the options. There were basically three.
1. C-Section. Maybe save the kids. 50% chance she would recover enough from the torn uterus to rebreed. $300 plus.
2. Shoot her, and do a quick c-section to try and save the kids. We don't have any guns on the place, so not really an option.
3. Kill her and lose the kids too. Though the vet had not felt any movement or sign of life since arrival.
Money is definitely not something we have a lot, or even much, of. So we opted for the third option.
I had been doing everything right as far as repositioning, but physics prevented the birth. The vet explained her pelvis was too small for the kids to pass through.
We took advantage of the situation. We had the doe cut open so I could see how a c-section would go and to see how they were positioned. Part of me also wanted to know what they were. It was two doelings, of course. Though as dad pointed out. He would have pushed for meating them anyways so as not to pass on the small pelvis.
Now I am worried. Why is her pelvis small when we haven't had that problem in the past? Was it her sire, Sparky? If so, I am in for a nightmare in the coming month. We have a number of Sparky first time fresheners due and settled to the same sire. We've had three Sparky daughters abort at a month out (two sets of twins and a singleton). We've had one Sparky daughter deliver twins just fine. So fine, I wasn't expecting them for another week and she delivered on her own at the goat pen and not at the cow barn.
For the first time, I actually really, honestly, dread the coming month of kidding. I'll have to get over it as we are expecting 30+ more to kid this year.
Rest in Peace Z22
