New Kids at Mystic Acres

When I got home late last night from the neighborhood get-together, I checked my goat, Celtic Kid, to make sure she wasn’t ready to kid. (Her due date was March 23rd and she was as big as a house.) Her ligaments were softened – a sure sign of kidding in the next 24 hours, so I put her in the kidding pen that we had prepared with fresh straw. I turned on the baby monitor and went to bed.

Celtie is a noisy goat in labor and prefers me there, if possible. That means that I didn’t sleep, but instead tossed and turned as I listened to her on the monitor. At 6:00 am I finally gave up the pretense of sleep and set up the surveillance camera and television. That began about 6 hours of walking back and forth to the barn, doing chores, spending time with Celtie, and getting all the preparations (iodine, towels, lubricant, etc.).

Around 10:00 am I started thinking that something wasn’t right. Celtie seemed to be in hard labor, but she kept getting up and moving around. Nothing was coming. By 11:00 I took it seriously and by 11:30 she was willing to let me examine her. This was not an easy task. A kid was still in her uterus, coming tail first and stuck. I had to pull down and straighten the kid’s legs for delivery, which was painful to Celtie. But she was relieved when the baby (a doe) finally came out.

Not long after she started trying to push out another kid, only to have one large leg hanging out and not moving any farther. When I checked on the kid, I found the other leg in the correct position, but a GIANT head stuck. I knew I couldn’t just pull him out without damage to one or the other of them. Then I remembered reading about posterior human babies and how they rotate when they come out, so I gently rotated the legs a little bit and pulled a bit while she pushed. The monster finally came out – a beautiful, red and black buck – Mystic Acres new herdsire! He is just what I had hoped for.

The third kid (I had expected four or five) was another small girl who came out under Celtie’s power, wrapped like a little package in the amniotic sac.

Babies all got their colostrum and Celtie is doing well with one kid (other two being hand-raised on goat milk). Because of the intervention, I gave her a uterine infusion of 5 ml LA-200 and 15 ml sterile water, as recommended in the medication section of Goat Health Care.

And now it’s time for me to take a nap!