17. Diets, colostrum, dangers to hamsters?

Thanks for posting this! I love answering your questions and sorry if it took me a little while to answer your last ones. I had to think about it and I got really busy.

 

 Are Nubian Goats picky in their diet?  That is to say, do the exhibit a penchant for variety or will they just eat anything they come across? They can be kind of picky sometimes, but ours eat what we give them. They do like some things more than others, like they prefer alfalfa over just grass hay, they love their sweet feed, and stuff like that. Certain goats like some things that others don't. Like... Shirly wouldn't touch pretzels but Laverne loved them, I've heard goats like thistle but mine won't eat it, and mine devour sunflower seeds while our friends with goats have to sneek them into their food. Also, there are some foods that are bad or even poisonous to goats, such as apricot leaves. Mine still try to eat them though.

You had taught me that goats have a sensitive digestive system so I was wondering about the colostrum intake.  Do goats have to nurse a little with their mom or can they go straight to a bottle when they are born?  Do they need to have an adequate intake of colostrum from their mom to get their digestive and immune systems up and running or can they get what they need from a bottle? Colostrum is very important for a baby goat and it's immune system. We do bottle feed ours, but we milk the momma and give that to them. So, we don't drink what we milk for the first couple days since it's colostrum. Then they share her milk with us. I did feed my first goat a milk replacer(formula) but she was 2 weeks old. So, yes they need colostrum. If the momma should die or won't produce colostrum, there's a chance the babies could die.

How long does a goat need to be fed from the bottle before they will start eating and grazing? There's no set time, since everyone say different. We have a book that we follow. It says that it's a safe guess to say that most kids are completely off milk by 8-10 weeks old. Some people feed way longer though, up to 6 months. So it depends on what you want.

Lauren wants to know if Goats eat hamsters?  And are goats dangerous for hamsters? I'm just guessing on this by how the goats act towards mice and chipmunks in the barn. They actually ignore them. They could maybe hurt a hamster if they didn't see it and accidentally stepped on it. But for the most part, no they are not.

 

Love you and have an amazing day!

kk