Dr. Olcott: Okay. Yeah the critical things on that are number one, not letting that doe get too fat during the course of pregnancy.

Tammy: And how do you know if they’re too fat?

Dr. Olcott: Well we do that by a real simple technique and it’s called body condition scoring or BCS and on goats we use a five-way numbering system, so a five is just the fattest that you could ever imagine, a one is the skinniest goat. In general, we shoot for our goats to be right about that middle point, a three. And, again, the technique is simple. We do it consciously or unconsciously when we walk around the mouth every weekend, “Boy there’s someone who’s really heavy and there’s someone who’s really skinny” kind of approach and that’s all we’re doing with our goats is trying to determine okay are we’re too heavy? Are we’re too skinny? If we’re too skinny we’re going to raise the amount of nutrition in their ration. If they’re too heavy we’re going to start to decrease it. And it’s done in goats better by hands-on, that is by visual observation, and the reason is the goats, especially in the winter, have enough hair on them that it’s hard to see just what’s going on underneath that, so you need to put your hands on them. When you put your hands on them, you should be able to feel some bones. That’s not a bad thing. So you should be able to feel the top of the backbone with just gentle pressure, you should be able to feel the ribs with just general pressure, and then feel on goats, it’s important to feel up in the brisket up in the front of the goat because goats first staring laying down fat inside and then once that’s kind of full then they start laying down outside fat. They’re different than the way cows do it and they’re different than the way people do it. So make sure you feel them right at the front of the chest because that’s one of the first signs that a goat’s getting too heavy and then feel the rest of the animal as well.
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