Speaker Post: Deborah Niemann of Antiquity Oaks

Reader Contribution by Deborah Niemann
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The Natural Home Dairy

Can you milk a goat if it was not bottle-fed? Do you have any trouble selling kids if you don’t bottle-feed? Can you show a goat if it was dam-raised?

These are just a few of the questions I’ve been asked over the years by people who want to have dairy goats but don’t want to take them away from their mother to bottle feed them. Like me, they think that milk straight from mom is the healthiest way to raise kids. But they’ve been led to believe that they have to take the babies away from their mother. Unfortunately, there is a lot of misinformation out there.

There seem to be a few reasons for the bias against dam raising kids. First, people see commercial dairies bottle-raising their kids, so they assume that’s the way it has to be done. Second, some people think that all dam-raised kids are wild. And third, if a goat has a disease such as caprine arthritic encephalitis (CAE), it can be transmitted through the mother’s milk and infect the kid.

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