You always wanted to keep dairy goats. You wanted your own fresh — and free — goat milk, goat cheese, goat milk yogurt and maybe even goat meat without having to worry about antibiotics and hormones in the milk.
In this blog series, we share with you things we wish we would have known before getting into dairy goats. We hope our experiences will help you, whether you have two or fifty goats. We are not perfect, we are not veterinarians, and we definitely
still have a lot to learn, but if we can help you avoid some of the mistakes we made, we have achieved our goal of keeping not just ours, but your dairy goats healthy and happy, as well. There are eight parts to this blog series, and today we will start with Part 1 (please see the end of this post for subsequent parts)
They get bored and lonely when alone. It is never a good idea to just have one goat, you need at a minimum two goats. Two does or a doe and a wether (a neutered male goat) or a buck and a doe, if you are ready to start a little herd. They huddle and cuddle,
they eat and they sleep together. And no, a human, even though much-loved, cannot substitute as a companion. A lonely goat will climb on cars, get into your garden, and sit on your porch or escape. A lonely goat will be a noisy goat, because they will call for a companion.
Baby goats are kids, males are bucks, females are does and neutered males are wethers.
Goats climb, jump, crawl and run over or under anything they want to.
If they stay in their pasture, it is because they want to be there. You need to have good fencing before you get a goat or two.
