More Babies

On Sunday I got to the allotment in the afternoon to find that Spot had had two babies, both billies. One was strong and receiving lots of attention from Spot. The other was weak (though he had a strong voice) and lying on the ground, unable to get up. It was clear he wasn’t going to survive without intervention from us. I took off my shirt, wrapped him in it and took him home. We had in store a sack of dried goat milk for kids so we made some and put it into one of the bottles we had bought ready for just such an eventuality.

We managed to get him to drink some of the milk but throughout the evening he was too weak to stand up. If we put him on his feet, his legs seemed to move in completely different directions. We persevered, feeding him regularly through the evening. We even put him in a box next to our bed and fed him at 4am, then again at 6am and 8am.

Through Monday, he remained noticeably wobbly on his feet and his legs still seemed to go in all directions. However, though on Sunday my expectation was that he would not survive, I became more confident that he would pull through. Tuesday saw further improvement and he certainly showed he has an appetite. Today has seen further improvement with his legs working properly and he is quite steady and beginning to skip around.

The problem for us is that Spot will not accept him as he was taken away from her shortly after birth and she will not have bonded with him. We are stuck with the job of bottle feeding him until he is weaned. He can’t stay in the house for too long either or else he will make a complete mess of the place! We will need to consider how to reintroduce him back to the allotment and the other goats. I suspect it will be a couple of weeks yet before we can do that. In the meantime, he continues to be fed at 4am (and many other times of the day as well) and to sunbath in our back garden.

Until 2009 I was working in London, UK, but I gave it up to pursue a life of self-sufficiency. My aim is to grow or forage for all my food, produce my own power and live a healthier and greener lifestyle. I left London to return to my home village of Sunniside, near Newcastle, in the North East of England. I have a couple of plots of land there as well as the garden of my house. Our village is a commuter area for Newcastle but we are surrounded by countryside which we use for picking wild foods. My mission in life is to show that it is possible to live well without destroying the planet in the process. I am also keen to ensure knowledge of historic recipes and cooking is kept alive. I regularly try out recipes from old cookbooks using the food we have grown. I make videos about our progress and about how to cook home-grown foods.

These can be viewed on www.youtube.com/jonathanwallace.

www.self-sufficientinsuburbia.blogspot.com