Bottle Babies

Well, we have three bottle babies on the farm at the moment - actually two bottle babies and one bucket baby.

The first baby was rejected by her momma, something that happens every once in awhile.  This time it was our young mother, Stitch.  She delivered two babies, but abandoned one within minutes of birth.  The doeling, named Mary, was out in the corner of the pen, shivering and alone.  The buckling, named Apollo, was with Stitch.  We actually thought she had only delivered one baby until M noticed the other one.

I tried for several hours to get Stitch to accept her baby, but after forcing her to let Mary nurse a few times, it was obvious that she was not going to take care of the doeling.  So we brought her inside and began the task of bottle-feeding.

The second baby came from our good friend over the mountains.  She had a doe with triplets and was bottle-feeding one...but she wasn't home enough to feed three times a day.  She knew that I was, so we met in the middle and she gave me the doeling.  The biggest benefit to having more than one bottle baby is that you can leave them outside at night instead of in the bathroom...and that's a big benefit.

The third baby is not a goat.  He is a piglet.  He is one of two very small piglets in the litter.  I decided to supplement his feedings to help him in the first few months of life.  He probably wouldn't have made it if I hadn't.

We started Grunt, the piglet, with a bottle.  But for some reason, this little guy could not figure out how to suck on the nipple.  Instead, he would chew on it.  It achieved a similar effect, but with a lot more mess.  So a friend suggested a bowl.  It took a few tries, but Grunt now happily drinks his milk from a bowl three times a day.

The funnest (and sometimes most annoying) part about having bottle babies is the bond that they have with humans.  We cannot go outside without hearing them call to us.  At the moment, they are small enough that all three can wiggle their way through the fence and over to us.  It's pretty cute watching two doelings and a piglet run from the pens to the house.  It's not so cute when you don't intend to feed them at the moment.  We sneak out a lot if we're leaving close to a feeding time.