Before I scare you off, this is not a post about anyone dying. It’s about how the most beautiful thing in the world — birth — triggers the most intense fear of death. And that fear of death can wind up causing it. I’ve seen it happen, but that’s a story for another day.
This is a tough time of year for me. Between my online courses, Goats 365 membership, and social media presence, the Thrifty Homesteader team and I get a lot of questions about goat birthing. Most of those questions are rooted in fear of death. Is the mom okay? Is this normal? Will the kids be okay? Many people think that labor can kill a goat, which it cannot. Hypocalcemia, toxemia, and a uterine rupture from an intervention can kill a goat, but labor itself cannot kill a healthy goat.
I spend a lot of time — often around 2 to 5 a.m. — trying to figure out how to help people overcome this fear. Tuesday morning, I woke up at 4:30 and couldn’t go back to sleep, as I spent a couple of hours lying there thinking about this.
I also knew that Jennifer was at day 150 of her pregnancy, meaning there was a 99% chance that she would have her babies that day. I wasn’t worried about her, but I knew many goat owners would be.
My Nigerian dwarf goats are incredibly efficient, birthing their babies between day 145 and day 150 after breeding, and I knew Jennifer had been bred 150 days earlier. We are up to about 760 births now, and only two or three have given birth after day 150, which is why I was so certain that we’d see babies before the day's end.
After lying awake for an hour, I picked up my phone and opened the Ring app to turn on the camera above the kidding stalls in the barn, even though the baby monitor had been completely silent all night. All of the goats, including Jennifer, were sleeping soundly, so soundly, in fact, that I had to watch the timer to be sure that the video was not frozen.
I finally gave up on sleep at about 6:30. I made myself a cup of coffee and sat down to journal. I opened the Ring app again to see how Jennifer was doing. I saw her tail flip up over her back as her legs stretched out in front of her, which a lot of people would interpret as “pushing,” but it’s not second-stage pushing, which is when the cervix is fully dilated, and the kid is on its way into the world.
Even though I always tell everyone that every birth is different, even with the same goat, this was Sherri’s granddaughter, so I expected babies by noon at the latest. But I might hear a blood-curdling scream in ten minutes and find myself rushing out to the barn to find a kid on the ground already. That has happened many times over the years with Sherri’s progeny. As my husband was heading out for morning chores, I asked him to check on Jennifer first to see if there was a big, long blob of mucus hanging out or anything that meant I should be ready to run at a moment’s notice.
We all have our biases, some based on more facts than others. The facts in this case led me to expect a quick birth. Back in 2003, Sherri was the fifth goat we ever bought. She usually did not make a sound in labor until the head was coming out, and her daughters, granddaughters, great-granddaughters, and so on have followed that same script for the past 20 years.
As I was eating lunch, I heard a few bleats over the baby monitor. I wondered if every bite I took would be my last before I would hear that tell-tale scream that would seem to go on forever, the scream that meant a newborn baby goat was being pushed into the world. That would be my cue to jump up and run to the barn.
Why was I not in the barn already? Because I had learned a long time ago that sitting in there and watching a goat in early labor just made me anxious. So I started staying in the house, going about my normal day with the baby monitor turned on so that I’d know when I was needed. My goats don’t need me during the first stage of labor when the cervix is dilating. There is nothing I can do to help during that time, nothing I need to do other than make sure that they are continuing to eat.
Because I wound up in the emergency room after Plume’s birth last week, I’ve been especially careful around the barn this week. The idea of running to the barn at the last minute was scary. That sounds dramatic, but I’ve stared at my computer for ten minutes now, trying to find the right word, and it was scary. The older we get, the worse the consequences of a fall can be. My father died at age 93 from a shot of morphine after he fell and broke his hip.
After lunch, I decided I was wise enough to change my routine without succumbing to fear. I took my laptop to the barn, put it on the shelf at the back of the kidding pens, and started watching training videos from a new business coaching program I joined a week ago. I sat on a chair in the kidding pens, holding baby goats in my lap, rotating babies every 15 or 20 minutes or whatever felt right. I also watched Jennifer without judgment. I remembered giving myself pep talks in the early years, telling myself, “This is how this goat is going to give birth today,” and “If the goat is happy, I’m happy.”
My husband left for work around noon and asked me if I remembered what Jennifer’s birth had been like last time. I said I did not, but it didn’t really matter because every birth was unique. This is how she’s doing it today.
Around mid-afternoon, Jennifer took a nap with her head on the ground, which is not necessarily bad, but most goats nap while holding their head up. A bit of fear rose up, and I thought, “Oh, no! What if she’s going into ketosis?” I realized I didn’t know when Jennifer had last eaten. I couldn’t recall her eating hay since I’d set up camp in the adjoining kidding pens.
I grabbed a feed pan and put a couple cups of alfalfa pellets in it, sprinkled about a cup of goat feed on that, and tossed a handful of black oil sunflower seeds on top. When I set it in front of her, she immediately began gobbling it up as if she hadn’t seen food all day. She didn’t stop until the pan was empty.
No problem with ketosis! And maybe it was a coincidence, or maybe she had been running a little low on fuel, but it seemed like her contractions started getting closer together at that point. The first stage, mini-pushes that confuse and scare newer goat owners, were gradually getting stronger. At 5:30, I noticed she was pushing with her whole body. Her head went back, and she lifted her hips off the ground when her tail flipped up over her back, and she pushed her hind legs straight out in front of her.
I stood up from my chair, where I’d been holding a baby goat, and went to the front of Jennifer’s pen to get a closer look. She stood up, and I saw a thick string of mucus hanging all the way down to the ground. Finally! We were getting closer. I texted my husband, “We have mucus!”
I walked into her pen, picked up one of the towels that had been waiting on the back shelf, and I sat down in the straw to wait. I was a couple feet away from her, sometimes taking pictures or videos as she pushed. I didn’t realize until watching the videos later that she still wasn’t making much noise, so I’m happy that I had decided to stay in the barn and avoid that last-minute run when birth was imminent.
Her vulva would look like a grapefruit was going to explode from it during her pushes because there was a big bubble of amniotic fluid in the sac. The grapefruit would deflate when she stopped pushing. During one push, the amniotic sac broke.
The grapefruit disappeared, and a small, black, pointy thing appeared with the next push. It looked like a hock, the elbow of the hind leg, meaning that the kid was presenting butt-first with its legs tucked under the body as if it were lying prone in the pasture already. While this may present a lovely photo of a goat relaxing in the pasture, it is not an ideal position for an easy birth.
Back hooves are so easy that they are not even considered “breech” by veterinary definitions. Tail first is breech and is more challenging because the rump is bigger and not as tapered as the nose, which is ideal. If giving birth nose-first is like pushing out an avocado, and tail-first is like pushing out a grapefruit, then hocks and rump is like … I don’t even know ... a grapefruit with sausages on the side?
I am not going to say that it would have been impossible for her to push the kid out on her own. She could have done it. The thought never crossed my mind that I had to help or that the kid would die. Having seen plenty of goats give birth to breech kids, I knew it would likely be exhausting, so when the hock was out far enough for me to grab it with my thumb and forefinger, that’s exactly what I did. The hind leg easily popped out, and I pulled while she pushed, and the kid was born. It was an incredibly huge kid. I assumed it was a male because it was so big, and I was right.
As I was drying the kid and cleaning off its nose, Jennifer started pushing again, and within five minutes, there was a bubble with a hoof, a nose, and a pink tongue sticking out of the mouth.
I popped the amniotic sac, and the fluids spilled out as the kid was torpedoing his way into the world. After putzing around for about 12 hours, we now had two big healthy bucklings, and within minutes, Jennifer stood up and started walking around, licking her two babies that were scooting around in the straw. With temperatures in the lower 60s, the kids were on their feet within ten minutes, looking for their first meal of colostrum. Both of them figured out how to nurse quickly, and I started to think I might be able to attend the premier of Food Inc 2, which was showing at the theater an hour away.
I looked at Jennifer’s back end to be sure she was done having babies, but instead of seeing a blob of fetal membranes, I saw an umbilical cord that was only about two inches long. That would mean she most likely had another kid because there was no sign of a placenta.
Normally, I would have just waited to see what happened, but I really wanted to go see that movie, so I decided to bump her to see if I felt more kids. I stood over her and reached down, wrapping both arms down around her belly just in front of her udder, and lifted her belly.
Whoa! It felt like a little bag of bones in her belly, which meant there was a baby in there. So I gave up on my hopes of making it to the movie and sat down to take pictures of the two kids while waiting for her to give birth to the next baby.
After 15 minutes or so, she gave a little push and then went back to acting as if nothing special was happening. Every few minutes, she’d give another little push. The magical 30 minutes came and went, but Jennifer was happy, so I was happy. About 45 minutes after the second kid had been born, Jennifer gave a big, serious push, and there was the familiar picture of a hock.
“Are you kidding me? Another hock?” This is not a very common birthing position, so seeing it twice with one doe was really a surprise. As I had done with the first kid, when the hock was out far enough for me to grab it, I snagged it with my thumb and forefinger and pulled when Jennifer pushed. The kid was born, and I wiped off his nose after setting him in front of Jennifer so she could lick him and bond.
Like his big brothers, this little guy was on his feet and looking for the teat within minutes. Unlike them, he seemed clueless as he’d keep moving as the teat would brush against his lips. I tried pointing him in the right direction, and sometimes, he would get so close! It is incredibly hard to watch a newborn coming so close and missing it. Five or ten minutes feels like an eternity, and I don’t know how long it actually took him, but it felt like forever.
When I say “little guy,” that’s actually laughable because all three of these kids were around 5 pounds, equaling 15 pounds of kids in her belly! Yes, they are purebred Nigerian dwarf kids. I have never had a doe give birth to more than one kid that size in a birth. She was so big, I really thought she was going to have quads, which would have been perfectly reasonable as quads would have averaged 3.75 pounds, which would have still been above average but far more sensible than three kids averaging 5 pounds each!
Overall, this was an easy, uneventful birth. The only reason I helped with the kids is because I’ve seen does give birth with a tail-first presentation, and they have to push so hard and usually so long unless the kid is quite small. The breech kids have always been fine, but the doe gets tired.
Helping Jennifer birth the kids was a matter of compassion, not fear. When I learned how big the kids were, I felt even better about helping. It would have been exhausting for her to push out the breech kids on her own. I only recall having one 5-pound breech kid in the past, and the doe would have her head lying on the straw with her tongue hanging out between contractions. I felt terrible for her, and when the hip bones were finally out, I was able to hook my thumb and forefinger behind them to help pull as she pushed.
I have heard some people say that a breech kid can’t be born without help, and they advocate pushing it back into the uterus, finding the hind legs, and pulling them out. But that is very difficult physically because the doe is pushing against you as you are trying to push the kid back into the uterus. Not to mention the fact that she is screaming bloody murder when you do that.
It is also dangerous because you could tear the uterus. Unfortunately, some people don’t understand that it is possible to cause a uterine rupture, but I know from personal experience that it can happen. It happened to my doe Coco when the vet pulled kids. You may not know that you caused a uterine rupture because, as horizontal animals, goats bleed out into their abdomen. When the necropsy showed a 14 cm tear in Coco’s uterus, I was shocked because I had not seen any unusual bleeding after the birth.
An infection is also possible when you go into the uterus. So, I always do everything I can to avoid that. That means doing nothing unless I believe it’s truly needed, which it almost never is. “First, do no harm” is one of my mantras.
Grabbing the hock and pulling the hind leg out reduced the circumference of what Jennifer was trying to push out, and it gave me something substantial — the hind leg — to pull when she pushed. In both cases, the kid was born within seconds.
But there was a lot more about Jennifer’s late pregnancy and birth that might have worried some owners.
For more than a week before Jennifer kidded, I kept thinking, “That would worry some people.” For starters, the muscles around her tail head were softer than Plume or Liz two weeks ago, and she had a little brown blob of sticky mucus on her vulva. It’s not uncommon for people to worry about a premature birth when they see even one of those things a week before a doe is due. Mucus alone can be scary, but colored mucus really scares people that something is wrong.
Then Plume and Liz both kidded at day 146 of their pregnancy, while Jennifer just kept walking around with her big belly full of kids. I don’t know how 145 became “the due date,” but many people worry that the doe is overdue after that. Anything between 145 and 150 is perfectly normal for Nigerian dwarf goats, and standard-size goats can go up to 155.
Unlike some very stoic does that give you no hint they are in the first stage of labor, Jennifer made no secret of the fact that she was in early labor. She could have been in real trouble with the wrong owner because many people start worrying when they think a doe is “pushing.” Knowing when a doe is really in labor, as well as being able to tell the difference between the first stage and the second stage are the biggest challenges most people have.
When I saw the second kid’s head emerging with the tongue sticking out, I took a photo because that scares a lot of people. I took the photo to use in my educational material to show people that the tongue was sticking out, and a healthy kid was born within seconds.
I even had someone send me a text once with a photo of an emerging nose with a tongue sticking out. She wrote, “The kid is gone. What should I do?” And someone else asked in a panic, “The kid bit its tongue when it was being born. What should I do?”
It feels like an impossible task to attempt to educate people on every possible version of a normal birth. The reality is that goats have been giving birth since the beginning of time, and they tend to be very good at it.
Unfortunately, most people in modern society are very scared of birth because they have had so little exposure to it. A friend who is an OB/GYN who works with residents in a teaching hospital said that there is a lot of fear surrounding birth in our society, and she is right.
What can I do about that? Obviously, there is nothing I can do about the greater societal issue, which instills fear and clouds the judgment of many people. All I can do is tell my stories and hope people find value in them — and maybe a little courage.
Perhaps they’ll find a little courage in themselves to have faith in their goats and respect for the centuries of knowledge within each goat’s body. They’re not perfect, but they know a lot more about giving birth than our human brains can comprehend.
I have recently been trying to choose a few words that describe the values of my company, Thrifty Homesteader, and one of them is Curious. We know we don’t have all the answers, which is why we maintain a curious attitude, which leads to learning and better understanding.
Being curious is one reason I can stay calm during my goats’ labors and births. Even after 760 births, I know I have not seen everything — not even every version of normal — and in every birth, I remind myself, “This is how this goat is going to give birth today, and as long as she’s happy, I’m happy.”
As I wrote in my book, Raising Goats Naturally, I have learned far more from my goats than from any book or person — but to continue learning, I have to remain curious, knowing that my goats will continue to teach me more every day.
Thank for this. I have been getting reamed on my latest YouTube video because I didn't go in to look for the kid as fast as the keyboard warriors thought I should. It's never my first choice. Last year, the buckling that presented tail first was a runt and super easy to get straightened out as he was almost hanging out already. This year (different doe) the kid was not far enough into the birth canal and I could barely touch him to tell he was backwards with his legs forward. Super stressful for me and the doe, obviously.