How Much Milk to Bottle Feed an Orphan Goat
Nubian doe Frosty was extremely timid and cautious. Before she would do anything new, she took her sweet time checking things out. So when she had her first kid, she wasn’t sure if she wanted to be a mother. She also wasn’t sure she wanted to be milked. That made a difficult task out of coaxing the kid to nurse. I ended up milking Frosty and feeding the milk to her kid. But first I had to remember how much milk to bottle feed an orphan goat.
The Kid Was Tiny
Frosty’s kid weighed only 3.5 pounds at birth. By comparison, Frosty weighed 7.25 pounds at birth. So of course we named the doeling Tiny.
Luckily, Tiny had a good sucking reflex, so I didn’t have to do the “milky figure in the mouth” trick. And she got plenty of colostrum during my initial attempts at getting Frosty to let her nurse. So now all I had to do was make sure she got the right amount of milk.
If you read my blog Bottle Feeding and Weaning Dairy Goat Kids, you know how I feel about that situation. I haven’t bottle fed a kid in decades. So I hit the internet to remind myself how much milk Tiny should get.
Finding information based on the kid’s body weight was difficult. Most of the sources I found related ounces of milk to age. Since our Nubian newborns range in weight from 4 to 7.5 pounds, and since Tiny was even smaller than the smallest, feeding by age makes no sense to me.
When I did find information pertaining to body weight, the recommendations ranged from 10% to 20%. With more sleuthing, I discovered that the lower percentage pertains to milk replacer, while the higher percentage relates to whole goat milk. Milk replacer, in my opinion, is nasty stuff, but happily I have a source for real milk.
I started out feeding Tiny 20% of her weight in milk each day, but she was always hungry, so that clearly wasn’t enough. I went to 25%, keeping a close eye on her to make sure she didn’t get diarrhea. At the first sign, I would have backed off a little on the milk, solving the problem in a jiffy. But that didn’t happen.
Calculating How Much Milk
At Tiny’s 3.5 pounds of weight, or 56 ounces (3.5 x 16), 25% comes to 14 ounces. Divided into 4 feedings per day, that’s just shy of 4 ounces per feeding. A kid can do fine overnight without a bottle, so we scheduled the 4 feedings to coincide with our breakfast, lunch, dinner, and bed time.
By one week after birth Tiny had gained one pound, so I upped the milk to 18 ounces per day (4.5 x 16 x .25). Even then, she often screamed for more. Since it was the middle of a hot summer, I gave her water both to keep her hydrated and to help fill up her belly without causing tummy upset.
Because her mouth was so small, I started out with a 4 ounce pet bottle. After about two weeks, she was ready for a bigger 6 ounce bottle with a Pritchard teat.
By then Tiny weighed 6 pounds and was getting 3 cups (24 ounces) of milk per day in 5 feedings, with the extra one added in mid afternoon.
When I weighed Tiny on day 16 she had doubled her birth weight. Most kids nursing naturally take 30 days to double their weight.
After about a month Tiny weighed 10 pounds, and was nibbling at hay, goat chow, dried leaves, and grass. She was also full of pent-up energy. But we felt she wasn’t yet ready to defend herself against the bigger goats, and we had no other little ones at the time. So my husband Allan and I took turns watching while she cavorted around our backyard.
At that point we found a family bottle feeding lambs that was happy to have Tiny join them. And Tiny was ecstatic to finally have full outdoor freedom and plenty of playmates.
Continuing to Bottle Feed
Had we kept Tiny, we would have continued to weigh her every couple of days and continued to up the milk until she weighed at least 30 pounds, or about 25% of her expected mature weight. At that point we would no longer increase the milk but would continue bottle feeding until she reached 40 pounds.
Increasing the amount of milk doesn’t necessarily mean increasing the number of feedings. At the age of one month, the number of feedings may be reduced to 3 times per day. At two months, twice a day, then tapered off. When the amount of milk needed exceeds the capacity of the bottle, the kid could be switched to a bowl or pan.
Of course, the longer you bottle feed an orphan goat, the bigger it grows. That’s why we don’t wean kids that are nursing naturally. We let the kid, or mama goat, decide when enough is enough.
What About Frosty?
By the time she would be bred again, Frosty might have decided that being a mother wasn’t so bad after all. Or she might again completely ignore her offspring.
We weren’t willing to find out, running the risk of having to bottle feed another orphan goat. And since we had too many goats anyway, we made the decision to let her go.
Frosty currently enjoys the companionship of a miniature pony. At least now she doesn’t need to make the big decision as to whether or not she’s up for motherhood.
