165 day gestation period for goats?

  Yesterday we asked Donna of Edelweiss Acres to come by and look at Mrs. Robinson. Donna is not only incredibly knowledgeable about goats she owns the buck Mrs. Robinson was bred to.

We are currently on Day 157. The normal gestation for a goat is 150. Some goats, like those at Fias Co Farm (my go-to Internet source for goat information), kid at 145.

But apparently, it's not uncommon for a goat to go until 165. Just like with humans the sperm can live in the doe for a few days waiting for an egg to drop.

The main issue with us is, we don't know Mrs. Robinson's history. We know that she was culled from a dairy and sent to the slaughterhouse (which is where Barbara from The Goat Rescue of Puget Sound rescued her from).

There's many reason why a dairy would cull a goat and we always thought it was probably for her personality. Mrs. Robinson wouldn't win any awards from her peers for kindness, that's for sure. She is absolutely wonderful with people but really quite mean to other animals. This makes flock management a bit, shall we say, challenging at times but its just something we've learned to work around. We tell ourselves she's like this because she is our herd queen but it's also because she's just a bit bitchy :)

In talking to Donna, she may have been culled for her kidding behavior. Maybe Mrs. Robinson wasn't a predictable kidder. Or maybe she consistently threw small kids which needed help to get up and moving. I understand this, they too are running a business and so this would have been a legitimate reason to get rid of her.

We're also big fans of this theory since Donna couldn't feel a baby in there. But, you can see "something" moving. Because she is a big doe it's highly possible the tiny kid is behind her organs. No biggie, just how it is.

And so there's also the option that it's a false pregnancy, where the doe exhibits all the signs of being pregnant but all that's inside is a sack of fluid. She will actually pass this sack of fluid just like passing a kid.

We're remaining optimistic that she is pregnant. She has been nesting, yawning and grinding her teeth. She is starting to look more sunken along her spine, as if the baby has dropped, but she doesn't have her milk yet. And maybe she won't get it, which isn't a problem either, we have all the supplements necessary to fill in for her.

So we"ll continue to wait and monitor her. Its important for us to be there, not just because it's our first Farmstead birth but because we want to be there for her and any potential babies (reference, we don't know what kind of kidder she is).

If she's not pregnant we will probably try again as most does who have false pregnancies spring back to have successful kidding pregnancies. But either way, if in the end she never gets to be a mom with us that's okay too.

She's Mrs. Robinson-A one of a kind, diamond in the rough, wouldn't trade her for the world, kind of goat. No other explanation needed.