From bottle to teat and back again

  Normally it takes about 3-4 days for a mother goat to stop producing colostrum laced milk so when Francesca and Lucia, the baby goat girls, reached 4 days old, it was time to switch them from their mother's very carefully heat treated colostrum to regular goat milk. Luckily, we recently added Elanore to the goat herd. She's a big LaMancha doe who we tested for CAE just about the moment she stepped hoof on the farm. Thankfully she tested negative, and we have actually been freezing her milk since she got here just in case we needed to bottle raise any of the positive does' kids.

 Early on we decided to see if we could have the kids feed directly from Elanore instead of using bottles. We used this method very successfully with Thea and Gwenny.

 
   Both girls actually latched on quite quickly and drank until they were drunk with milk.

 Elanore didn't seem to mind having these two little monster feeding on her one bit as long as there was feed in her bucket.

  Unfortunately, Josie, the girls bio-mom, was onto us and started giving us the stink eye from the next room.

So full. 

  We tried having the girls nurse directly a couple more times and unless Elanore was secured on the milk stand, she was less than pleased with the two little ones attaching themselves to her udder. Ultimately, we decided that it was more work to try and tote the two girls out to the milk room several times a day and risk the wrath of Josie than it would be to just milk Elanore ourselves and make bottles for the girls so we have gone back to bottle feeding the beasts. 

  In a related note, we have just discovered these bottles from Premier 1 Supplies, and I cannot recommend them enough! The Pritchard teats screw securely onto the bottles so no wrestling on the leaky rubber ones. They also have an air flow valve that lets air back into the bottle as the little ones nurse so no more collapsing nipples and stopping to let air back in the bottle. Plus the bottles themselves are marked with ounces for easy measuring at feeding time. These bottles have seriously made life with bottle babies SO much easier!