does anyone have .....

[JoyKelley]

goats that dont eat like it's their last meal, knocking everything over , just generally acting like jerks???? If so , how did you get them to behave during meal times ????

[mygoat]

both of my goats have thier own bowls and tie ups so they cant get into each others food. they are fed in the same order everyday. if they dont come to get tied up, they dont get fed till they do. if they try to get into the grain bucket, they get a sharp slap in the nose and yelled at.

[mpillow]

ROCKS....in the grain dish to slow them down....I have some at opposite ends of the spectrum and they are mother and daughter! One is slow and never finishes her grain at milking time....the other one flips the dish off the end to let me know its empty.

[ihedrick]

I must be lucky; both of my doelings are well mannered at meal time. I don't know if it's just because of their age or if they have stuff to nibble on all day and the grain is just a desert to them. The rocks in the buckets should work; it worked on a horse I had that made a mess of meal time.

[trappmountain]

Mine have seperate dishes and run for the first one I fill. As soon as I fill the other they split up and eat from different ones. They also have a hay bag and plenty of good green pasture and I cut fresh limbs for them everyday. So they are very well fed and very friendly. I don't think I would go as far as to say they are weel mannerred though !!!

[Farmgirl2005]

You are all really lucky mine play musical bowls and knock eachothers over....it is not fun..and is a pain on the day of cleaning up the pen..since they dont eat it when it hits the ground..WEIRD DOOS

[Antoinette]

I have just learned to sneak around the ones I can't out run.....Once my husband had put a new latch on the gate that goes to our feed lot. He neglected to tell me(I think on purpose) Anyway, I go and sneak into our shed with the feed and get me a bucketful. I start to walk the 200 yards to our feed lot, when out of the corner of my eye, I see "the herd" racing toward me. I break out in a dead run and hit that gate, that I had opened a million times before, and guess what it won't work. Well, it took about 3 seconds for them to knock me over, take the bucket and eat whatever had fell on me. My dearest husband said he had never laughed so hard in his life....

[GrannyG]

Mine also act like they are starved to death and knock everything everywhere, I try to be neat and keep their feeding tubs looking neat and what a joke! They knock them everywhere. They have a big bale of hay
to munch on anytime, and plenty of grass and leaves. I think they
are just born that way.If I carry a bucket of feed, I have to keep popping Cocoa on her nose to keep her out of it.

[animal_kingdom]

Next round of babies, you creep feed them. Always have grain and hay available to just them. When they get too big for the creep, those same babies get another feeder that is always full. BUT only for them as the others will gorge themselves as they have not been taught self regulation.

The babies eat only what they need and have no need to learn to run towards the feed in fear of not getting any.

We do this now and it's beautiful. When the creep is empty and we haven't realized that it got that far all the way to empty, we fill it no problem. They only sniff the bucket and are so manageable. I just love it.

Now the older ones that we got as older does that weren't raised that way are a bit of a problem.

We took a pvc pipe. Maybe 6 -8 inches diameter or more and cut it in half length wise. It was run along side the fence. We now feed those goats and sheep from the outside of the fence. Feed is in a plastic can instead of metal..which they start hollering at the sound of the lid coming off so we changed it to be more sneaky. Then hay is given at the opposite side of the fence as the grain. While they are busy eating hay, it gives us just about enough time to get a few scoops of grain in the feeder and then we can finish the remainder of the feeder while they come running.

At first, we had the feeders in a separate pen and would fill them and then let the girls in to eat. Problem with that was they would crowd up at the gate and we would get pinched or trampled at the hoard pushing to get in!

Oh, the pipe is about 20 feet long. So when cut in half length wise, we have 2 20 feet pipes. One for the goats and one for the sheep.

[LittleJohn]

Well my first two does were reasonably well behaved but as soon as I got a billy it was thee's a crowd they have been fighting ever since.

[JoyKelley]

What started my question was that having rearranged stalls and the 3 weathers are 9 months old now and getting big but still sleep with their mother , they were 3 of my quads. I was in feeding breakfast saturday , it went ok, I left the stall and turned around to latch the metal gate and one of the weathers jumped on the gate and I took it right in the mouth. I was afraid I lost a tooth but fortunatly no, just a big inside cut and fat swollen lip for days and people looking at DH funny. I wrote the thread right after I got hurt.

I have my fingers crossed that I finally have fixed the problem. I have tried big pans and pouring over the fence but of course they step in it and won't eat it . or fight like dogs and spill it. I have tried the pans that hang on a fence and they knock them off. I have tried so many different things but I may have finally solved it. At least last night and this morning it worked good. I took plain ole buckets and used those safety latch hooks and just atttach them goat face high to the bull panel sides. ONe bucket for each one goat. Of course goat A has better food than goat B and they have to still fight but the feed loss is way down. They can't quite flip the bucket upside down yet.

I wait and I watch to make sure no horns get caught in the bucket handle and when they are done I take the buckets out for the same reason. I have two others , a doe and her daughter that share a floor pan like lovely southern ladies but these boys are just out of control. I already had to take their much smaller sister out and let her sleep and eat in a bull panel mini pen inside the big stall with them just to keep them from really hurting her. Other than that they are sweet gentleman and don't go after people, just beat the cr-- out of each other during meals .