The Long and Sad Story

It's been a tough summer. We have lost a couple of our girls this summer, and in both cases, we're not completely sure why.

We lost Bluebonnet the first part of June for some unknown reason.

Then Parker's Gourmet Cinnamon, who was due to deliver her boer goat kids on July 2 died two weeks before her due date. We found her outside, just laying around, and she didn't want to get up. We tried all of her favorite treats, but she just wasn't interested.

We checked her for injuries and there was nothing present that we could see, but you could tell she was in distress. When we got her moved, we saw that she had either begun to lose her plug, or she may have started into labor. We checked her, and saw that she had lost all of her ligaments, but she had not dilated at all. We started giving her water (using a turkey baster) and offering her food. She drank a lot, but wasn't interested in food.

We discussed what our options were: 1) we could continue to try to get her moving (and save her); 2) we could euthanize her and try to save her babies. We opted for the first choice,for now. At some point we called the vet and she provided me with some electrolytes, as well as penicillin (she thought it would be better than the LA-200 that I used with another doe after we checked her.) While Cinnamon seemed to be doing better, she still wasn't doing "good".

The vet finally came out around 5:30pm and we decided to give her some fluids via IV and Oxytocin to get her labor going again (it was quite obvious at some point that she was in labor, but not progressing). As soon as we got the IV in, she died. The decision was made to immediately open her up and try to save her babies.

I'm sorry to say that we couldn't save any of them. She had four beautiful babies, two boys and two girls. All of whom were gorgeous. It was a tough day for everyone.

Hayley asked for permission to watch the vet try to save the babies, and we decided that if she wanted to, she could. She came back in the house after they found the babies were also gone and said that it was very interesting (she said she started to say cool, but thought that was just rude!) and that she was glad that she'd watched.

I want to thank Heather at Sequim Animal Clinic for EVERYTHING that she did to help us to save our goats.

We have decided that if this were to happen again that we would probably have to seriously consider all aspects and maybe euthanize the doe sooner to try to save kids.