....is desperately ill. She's a pure bred Anglo Nubian and this is her 4th kidding. She kidded yesterday at 4pm no problems. 3 kids - 2 females and 1 male - all fine. She passed her afterbirth, ate her dinner and all well. I checked her at 2am this morning (as was out checking ewes cos we're lambing), didn't check at 5am as all was quiet over there. Then at 8am she was sitting down with her kids around her so I left her to carry on with all the other feeding. Got back to her about 8.45am and she was still sitting and clearly not quite right. Got her up and decided to milk her out so that I could bottle feed the kids before deciding what might be wrong with her. Started to milk and ....... strawberry milkshake came out. Rushed indoors to ring vet. Vet finally arrived at midday and diagnosed a Staph infection which had no doubt got into blood stream. She's currently on a drip (about half the bag in so far) on huge amounts of antibiotics both in her muscle and up into her udder. Vet gave her less than a 50/50 chance of survival but she's hanging in there at the moment. She even ate half a crust of bread at 5pm!!!! Kids are penned next to her but will no doubt now have to be bottle reared anyway, but at least she is aware of them there and they can't interfere with her drip etc. Desperately worried about her, but not holding my breath that she'll make it through the night, but you never know.
I asked the vet where this had come from as she'd been perfectly happy, healthy, eating well, lovely shiney coat etc and she said it had probably been sitting dormant in her udder and the trauma of kidding kick started it into action. You just never know do you.
Keep your fingers crossed for her - she's a lovely Ivans bred goat and I adore her.
