CARE OF KIDS
A young kid is not a very sturdy youngster. Good care should be given both doe and kid at this time. A warm shelter should be provided. May is the best month for kids to come, in the North. Extra feeding should be given the doe and plenty of water. If possible each doe with her kid should have a separate stall or pen so that the doe will know her own young one. If you can arrange that each pen in the kid stable can have an outdoor entrance the mother can come and go at will. A board a foot to eighteen inches high across this entrance will keep the kid from following his mother. When about six weeks old the kid will jump this board. By this token you will know that he is strong enough to jump about over the stones wherever his mother leads him.
FOOD OF GOATS
The comic papers may be right about some things, but they are wrong about goats. A diet of newspapers and tin cans will not keep a goat healthy nor produce a salable fleece of fine mohair. Angoras like common goats are browsers, not grazers like sheep. They eat coarse vegetation such as weedy growths and the twigs and leaves of underbrush, rather than grass. Besides this, particularly in winter, they should have other food. Leaves, table scraps like potato and fruit parings, turnips and other roots, and cabbage are all acceptable if clean. Parings and roots should be washed; if you expect goats to eat swill you deserve to be disappointed. Dirty carrots, rotten apples, sour or mouldy refuse do not tempt a self-respecting pig; much less an Angora. Oats in the sheaf are very good fodder for them. Grain is not required if clover hay, alfalfa, or cowpea stubble is plentiful. Too much grain makes a lazy goat and a lazy goat will not produce a handsome fleece. Bran may be fed for a change, and a little cotton seed or corn may be given, but sparingly. Leaves or other coarse food should be given plentifully at night, as Angoras relish a midnight lunch beside their three square meals a day.
A supply of rock salt should be kept where goats can get it whenever they want it. If it is given only at long intervals they may over-indulge. Water should be warmed slightly in winter if practicable.
SHELTER AND ENCLOSURE
Hardy as they are, goats cannot stand exposure to storms. They abhor wet. Cold rain or sleet storms are really dangerous to their health. Goats will go the long way round every time rather than get into mud. Mud is very bad for the fleece, too. Buyers refuse to pay for dirt.
Goat shelters should be dry, but they need not be tight except overhead. In fact many goats die of suffocation when huddled in close quarters. If the roof is just high enough from the floor for goats to go under, it can be open all round except perhaps on the side where the prevailing wind and storms would beat in.
No other animals should be quartered with goats. Experience shows this.
Goats prefer hard beds. Chaff or straw enough to absorb the liquid manure is all that should be put on the floor. Trees are the best shade from the hot sun, but if none are growing in the goats' pasture other shelter should be provided.