Bottle Feeding and Weaning Dairy Goat Kids

Like most newbie goat owners, I started out with the notion that bottle feeding and weaning dairy goat kids is mandatory. After several years of keeping Nubian dairy goats it dawned on me that I wasn’t doing my goats or myself any favors. Here’s why I now avoid both bottle feeding and weaning.

Bottle Feeding

Bottle feeding is a nuisance. Kids need to eat every few hours around the clock. You have to warm the milk before each feeding. And then scrupulously clean the bottles and nipples afterward. These conditions may not sound intimidating until you have to drag yourself out of bed at 2:00 a.m. and trundle out to the barn on a cold winter morning.

For the past several decades of raising Nubian dairy goats, I have bottle fed only when necessary. For instance, sometimes a kid is born small and too weak to steadily stand long enough to nurse. So I will bottle feed it for a few days. As soon as the kid is standing and nursing well, I turn it over to the mother goat to take care of. If the mother doesn’t want to let the kid nurse, I put them on the milk stand where the doe can’t move away.

The CAE Connection

The main reason goat keepers bottle feed is to avoid spreading Caprine Arthritis Encephalitis (CAE). This virus has no known cure. The preventive measure is to break the disease cycle through bottle feeding heat-treated colostrum and pasteurized milk.

The best way to avoid this situation is to purchase certified CAE-free goats. A doe that is not certified may be infected with the virus and pass it on to her kids. The main way a kid gets the disease is by nursing from an infected doe.

There’s also a chance a kid may be infected before it is born. Or it could be infected through contact with infected goats after it is born. (FYI: CAE does not affect humans.)

If you are acquiring goats, or you have goats and aren’t sure they are CAE free, you can have them tested. Google “CAE Testing” to find a long list of certifying labs.

About a decade into my goat-keeping venture, it occurred to me that my goats had never exhibited any sign of CAE. Or any other communicable disease, for that matter. I keep a closed herd, which means I breed my own stock and I don’t acquire goats from anyone else’s herd. So it also occurred to me that, even if my original goats might have had the virus, after a decade of heat treating and bottle feeding, the goats raised in my closed herd should be CAE-free.

Accordingly, I stopped heat treating and bottle feeding. In the three decades since then I haven’t experienced any issues that could be remotely related to CAE.

Goat Socializing

Some goat owners choose to bottle feed their babies for the purpose of keeping their goats friendly and people-oriented. Kids raised by hand are like puppies — always happy to see you. On the other hand, if you’re not careful, they can get overly friendly and pushy.

Kids raised by a doe tend to be shy unless you take time to work at socializing them. My method is to bring the doe to the milkstand for morning and evening feeding, and let the kids wander around the milk room while she’s eating.

That way they are used to being around me, and also they are acclimated to the milkstand. When time comes for hoof trimming, or when the young does are milked for the first time, there’s no rodeo about getting them up on the milkstand.

However, I discovered a devastating social effect of raising bottle babies and then switching to natural nursing. When the does were old enough to have their own kids, some of them rejected the kids. They refused to let them nurse, and in a few cases tried to kill them.

I say “tried,” but in one shocking case a doe actually did kill one of her kids. At first we thought it was an accident, but later we actually saw her try to kill a second kid.

With careful vigilance we finally moved past that hurdle. Now our does (all raised naturally nursed) are super mothers.

Weaning Pros and Cons

A lot of dairy goat keepers wean their kids at 6 to 8 weeks of age. As soon as their kids are comfortably eating solid food (hay, grass, and goat chow), they want to get all the does’ milk for themselves. That might make sense for a commercial dairy (selling milk, or cheese, or yogurt), but for home use a couple of goats can produce more milk than is generally needed.

That’s certainly the case in our house. Plus the longer kids nurse, the better they grow.

My solution, when the kids are at least 2 weeks old, is to separate the kids from the doe overnight. I milk the doe in the morning, then put the kids in with her so they can nurse the rest of the day. Eventually the kids will wean themselves, or the mother will decide when she’s had enough and keep moving away until they give up.

That’s how I raise doe kids. Buck kids are a different story. At about 12 weeks of age, the little guys start taking serious notice of their sisters and cousins, and I don’t want to invite “accidents.” So when the bucklings reach 12 weeks they either get sold or moved to our buck barn.

That’s my method regarding bottle feeding and weaning dairy goat kids. It may not be for everyone, but it works on our farm.