What do you use to heat your kid pen ??

[Helena]

Didn't want to "hijack" the thread about the terrible accident with the heat lamp in the family's goat pen. So very sad..But, what do you all do when you do need heat in the pens. I have always used heat lamps and made sure..sure..sure..that if they do get hit that the lamp will not fall by knotting the cord around the beam in the rafters really well. These are the hanging kind of heat lamps you usually by around feed stores. What can we all do to heat and be safer ???

[Sonshine]

I use a heat lamp, but I have mine high enough that they can't reach it. It heats the stall area well enough to keep it from freezing in there.

[Backfourty,MI.]

Goats as well as other livestock that are conditioned to the weather in your area should not need any form of extra heat if they have plenty of bedding, are dry, & out of the wind on real cold days & are healthy they shouldn't need a heat lamp.

We get some really cold temp's here & don't use heat lamps. If we do have kids born & it is still cold I will give them a hot water bottle under an old towel & they will snuggle on that or with their momma.

Pony here said she uses laundry bottles filled with hot water for kids to snuggle up against.

[rootsandwings]

My cord wraps around the side rail - out of chewing range, and then goes to a plug that it just barely reaches. To fall it would have to first unplug. It also has a guard.

[momagoat61]

If and when I must use a heat lamp I make darn sure it has aceramic socket and I run all my cords throught PVC pipe and never ever run the cords where they can come in contact with an animal.

[Alice In TX/MO]

I've been wondering if those radient heaters that mount on a wall would work.

[ozark_jewels]

I don't heat my kid pens. If it is so cold that I cannot leave bottle kids outside with no heat, I bring them inside short-term(I did that two weeks ago when kidding out in 0- temps). Dam-raised kids stay with their mother in an unheated barn with plenty of bedding.
With buddies to snuggle with, lots of *dry* bedding and a full tummy, bottle kids can handle very cold temps.
I will not use heat lamps. Too many people I know have had fires with them, even properly used. In fact, I rarely have anything electrical plugged in long-term in the sheds or barn.

[LittleRedHen]

I made some goat coats/sweaters for the first week because we had single digit temps and i wanted to be careful but i quickly found that they did fine without them. (four kids together)

[Cheribelle]

Unfortunatley, I have also lost kids from "snuggling"
The one on the bottom gets squashed.
I think my answer to this will be to next year have seperate smaller inside pens, a low roof/lid, less room for the goats body heat to warm up.

[ozark_jewels]

Originally Posted by Cheribelle

Unfortunatley, I have also lost kids from "snuggling"
The one on the bottom gets squashed.

I was going to add that to my post but forgot. I try not to have more than ten kids to a pen until they get a little bigger for the squishing reason. I lost one in a set of triplet doelings due to having twenty kids to a pen. When they get a little bigger, its not a concern.

[yarrow]

We keep our *groups* of kids down to no more then 8 per kid pen (when they are little, like Emily mentioned.. once they get bigger they don't pile on each other as bad) We have always had what we call the *hospital* room, out in the doe barn. It's an 8x8 room with a raised wooden floor, solid double walls (plywood on both sides of the 2x4's living dead space to help insulate) In that room we took horse panel (the small 2x4 opens) and built a floor to ceiling, cage in one corner. Inside that cage I put one of the electric radiant heater (the ones that look like an old radiator and are filled with oil.. about $45 at walmart) ... It was the safest heat source we could come up with.. caged off & set back away from the cage sides like it is even adult does can't get to the cords & such.. With the room built like it is, we never have to set the heater very high.. it warms up well.

I've always kept newborns in the house when kidding in cold weather.. but the heated hospital room was our main kidding room for Jan kiddings..(sure beat sitting in the unheated barn for hours in single digit temps! LOL) Had a really sick doe one year (needing a long recovery) that lived in there for most of the winter (with a friend)... I do keep a baby monitor & a smoke detector in the room too... that way IF something happened I could hear the alarm here in the house....

Keeping the babies warm (and worrying about new owners NOT being able to keep their newly purchased babies warm LOL) was our number 1 reason for switching our kidding season from Jan/Feb to March/April... (first does are due to start things March17th) We now have 4, 8x8 stalls in our kidding barn. I keep babies groups in there on chilly days (everyone sleeps inside at night) they are in outside areas during the day. The inside pens are hayed down deep, for snuggling in (when they are new, I put rubbermaid type totes on their sides (4 little kids fit in them just fine with nobody squished. The tote helps hold their body heat) But the totes become climbing, jumping toys before too long..(they can also be dangerous.. last year somehow a tote go flipped over upside down... Went out to check on the kids one afternoon.. it was windy & I had kept them in for the day.. .there was a little doeling stuck under the tote.. she was so hot.. the sides of the tote was dripping from the heat buildup... SO.. I plan on actually building wooden sleeping boxes this year.. that can be attached to the wall (no more flippping upside down & strong enough for climbing/jumping games)

susie, mo ozarks

[Cheribelle]

I had a dog crate in the barn full of straw for the babies. Well, Even tho I was sure it was too small for them, 2 of the big girls actually crawled in there too! Yep, I literally had to untangle them and pull them out. Squished baby on the bottom. It really is uncanny how many ways they can find to die or kill each other.

[jwal10]

I use a 55 gallon steel drum with 2 holes cut in the bottom for kids to come and go, mount the heat lamp in the top lid and secure the lid and barrel so they can not be moved. Heat lamp can be high, barrel retains heat and keeps wind out. Works well, usually 1 doe and her kids to a pen. I have 2 barrels rigged up....James

[Pony]

Originally Posted by Backfourty,MI.

Pony here said she uses laundry bottles filled with hot water for kids to snuggle up against.

Yup. Laundry soap bottles don't leak, and they really do hold the heat in.

But unless it's bitter cold, the kids don't need it as long as they can snuggle up together. Since I've not had more than 4 at a time, squishing doesn't seem to be an issue.

[PaulNKS]

I know this is a couple days old, but I still wanted to reply.

I live 100% off-grid. There's no way I'm going to use precious alternative energy to do what me and Mother Nature can do.

I have 20 does and want to continue to build that. I plan the breeding to have only 7 or 8 does kidding at the same time. I let two does kid in the same "area", which is a small three sided shed and one larger 3 sided shed. I use hay for bedding, that I bale so I'm not spending a fortune on hay. No heat sources whatsoever.

The first batch of does kidding this year, I saved all the kids and we had 9" of snow, temps at 0 to -10 with wind chills of -15 to -25.

If you understand your animals, that is the key. I know from being raised with cattle that the easiest way to keep a baby involves two major factors.

1. Keep the baby warmed from inside out.
2. Keep energy in the baby.

To do that, I went out every 2 to 4 hours around the clock for the first 2 ot 3 days of a kid's life. I would get the kids up, get the does up and make the babies nurse. If they didn't want to, I held their mouths open and squirted the warm milk into them until I knew they had enough. That would warm them from the inside out and provide their little bodies with the energy required to produce heat. Once a kid was a couple days old I knew he could handle the cold with his doe and sibling. With two does in one area, that gives 4 kids to "snuggle" (for a lack of a better word. lol)

Another thing I do... I don't know how valid it is, but there was a recent study performed on cattle. Some were fed in the evenings and some were fed in the mornings. The time of feeding overwhelmingly determined the time of birthing. The cows fed in the evenings were more likely to calve during the day while the cows fed in the mornings were more likely to calve at night. After doing some research, I had the opinion that the same chemical "stuff" was happening in goats that was happening in cows. So, I made sure that the goats were fed in the evenings. Every doe that has kidded so far (12) have all given birth during the day.

That daytime birthing in winter, made it a lot easier to save kids than birthing at night, which helped eliminate the need for artificial heat.

So... if you work with Mother Nature, you don't need artificial heat.

just my 2 cents.

[CaliannG]

That is iffy, Paul. I have had a friend that recently lost kids to the cold that were nearly a week old....she had brought out those kids during the day, to be with their dams, and left them laying in the sunshine and happily snoozing after an active, energetic round of play. The kids were healthy and happy.

She returned some time later to find them frozen to death, still in the sunshine.

No, you don't HAVE to use heat lamps to keep kids warm.... but one also has to realize that "Mother Nature" designed her animals to be healthy in certain climates...this is why you do not find pineapples growing wild in Canada....but you do in the Pacific Islands.

Even the mountain goats will have years of heavy kid loss due to uncommon winter weather, heavy storms late in the season, etc. And Momma Gaia has done a pretty good job of making mountain goats nearly impervious to cold.

But we are humans. We have brought all sorts of animals and plants WELL out of their climatic norms. There is a lot we can do with line breeding and inbreeding to make goats that are well adapted to specific locals....but that only goes so far. This is why I can watch a mostly white Alpine panting and miserable in the same hot weather that a black ND is ignoring.....while that same ND is huddled and shivering in weather that the Alpine is happily frolicking through.

While I do applaud "working with Mother Nature", I also remember that there are NO domesticated goats that are native to the Americas. None. Not one breed.

Bearing that in mind, I realize there is only so much I can do "naturally" before I need to step in and give my unnatural, non-indigenous livestock species that have been bred for centuries for production rather than hardiness in the wild, a helping hand.

I don't expect my blue and gold macaws to stay in an outside aviary year round and do just fine either...especially when I lived in Colorado.

[Pony]

I am definitely going to try feeding my pregnant does in the evening. Save me some sleep if nothing else!

[mygoat]

The feeding times thing is very interesting. I feed in the evening because that's when I get home from work/school, so it'll be interesting to see how many kid during the day.

[yarrow]

Originally Posted by Pony

I am definitely going to try feeding my pregnant does in the evening. Save me some sleep if nothing else!

we feed around 5pm... with all the kiddings we've had over the years.. I can only recall 5 times having a birth occur after 11pm... all 5 of those were back BEFORE we got cameras. I think had we not been going out to the barn, shining lights, waking the does up.. those 5 would have held off until morning. We now do our last *in-person* baby checks right before bed (between 11 & midnight).. we stay very low-key and quite during that last hands on (I can't sleep if I don't check ligaments before I go to bed)... MOST of our kids are born somewhere between 10am & 2pm... the rest seem to arrive between 7pm & 11pm. (we feed around 8:30am as well as the 5pm meal).. BUT.. just because NIGHT kidding are so RARE for us.. that doesn't mean someone isn't up every hour/on the hour.. (we take turns) .. to watch on the cameras and make sure there are no signs of labor (after years of night viewing.. my girls are usually standing to sleep and rather restless for a night or two before they kid- shifting weight from back foot to back foot-sometimes repositioning babies by rubbing along the wall.. just looking tired of being pregnant- many times grouchy and getting into it with her room mates... things usually calm down the night before kidding.. the does usually lay down and sleep thru the night ... it's THAT night that I don't ever go out and wake them up.. unless I want to be back out there at 3am and have middle of the night babies!!!

((you know now that I've actually posted this, we'll have ALL night time babies just because that's how goats do things.. BUT it's been 3 years since we've had babies before 9am...so fingers crossed I haven't jinxed us)))

susie MO. Ozarks

[Wags]

Hmmm..... that might just be the ticket for talking hubby into letting me get a camera for the barn. I can set up a monitor on my side of the bed and then my getting up and coming back frozen won't disturb him.