We lost the kid in the prior picture this morning. I found her with her mother about 7:00 this morning standing all hunched up, with a low temperature and thick, clear mucus coming out of her mouth. I brought her in the house, warmed her and treated her for floppy kid syndrome, pneumonia and pain, but she died but 8:00. I buried her out in the goat cemetery behind the property.
She died of aspiration pneumonia caused by her breech birth. Because she didn't have trouble getting started breathing, I didn't realize that anything was wrong. Irene Ramsay of New Zealand tells me that all breech kids should be swung after birth to get any excess amniotic fluid out of their lungs, just in case they aspirate. This is particularly important when there is a problem with the birth, as there was in this case.
Others on the WSU goat list shared that they had also experienced this problem, and usually lost the kids. Pat Stewart, the current publisher of Ruminations magazine tells me that they call this condition in dogs "water pups." It is usually fatal in a short time; in this case the baby died after 44 hours.
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