Martha's Note: I am very interested in the way people in other countries manage livestock. To anyone from the United States who is reading this story, July kidding will sound somewhat strange, but please remember Jewel is in New Zealand, and summer in the US is winter in the Southern Hemisphere. Also remember that goats, being goats, are the same the world over, but to a blind goatkeeper, some things aren't as easy to detect as they would be to most of us.

I have 10 milkers at present. Perhaps it might be more accurate to say nine and a half, as one of them has proven herself to be a maiden milker. She only gives a tiny amount, but as she's making it, and doesn't mind standing up in the bale, I might as well add her donation to the rest.

Most of the goats are Toggenbergs, but I also have one NZ Alpine-Saanen cross, and a couple of purebred Saanen. I also have a Toggenberg buck. I don't have separate paddock or pen accommodation for Mahogany the buck, and even if I did, the fences would have to be about five feet high as he can jump like an olympic pole vaulter. He got active in the mating department last autumn a little earlier than normal, so I visualized having all the does kidding in July.

In one way, I wasn't looking forward to this, as in a normal winter, July is usually a pretty foul month, but in another way, early kidding was going to suit me quite well. A woman had said she would take all the spare kids I had as she wanted to restock her property which is overrun with gorse, and, if you want to avoid the use of sprays, grazing it with goats is the best means of control.

However, she had said that she would only take the kids after weaning. I don't very often go to the trouble of raising kids these days, and I certainly wasn't going to the bother of bottle-raising them, so if Kay wanted to take them, it would mean that I would leave the kids with their dams until they were weaned.

I was told that they could safely be weaned at around 9 weeks to 3 months of age. If the does kidded in July as I expected, the kids would be weaned at about the end of September, and then the does would be producing milk above and beyond requirements, and this milk would be used to raise the calves that I usually buy in at this time.

Well, that was the strategy, but it didn't quite work out as I had hoped. Sure enough, several does did have kids in the middle of July, but then there was a complete cessation, and the second half of the herd didn't start producing until September. One of the does, Christina, vanished, and although I was sure that she was around and about, I couldn't find her.

When she did eventually turn up, I found that she had had kids some time earlier, but although we searched the place, we couldn't find any trace of them.

A greater misfortune than the loss of the kids, was that Christina had developed mastitis in one half of her udder. It looked very bad. However, by dint of injections of various sorts, and a great deal of hand massage and determined milking, I stopped it getting any worse, and I am now pleased to relate that although she has lost most of the tissue in that half of her udder, all signs of mastitis have cleared up, and she is producing a small amount of healthy milk from that side.

You may have noticed that in the above writing, I used the word 'we' several times. We in this instance referred to friends. I live alone, and generally have no help with the goats. However, I have goaty friends, who I can call on for assistance on the rare occasion that I need it.

As for the missing kid, we found its headless body in my neighbour's backyard. Their dog does have access to the paddock where Christina was, but I cannot accuse the dog of having killed the kid. She may have found it dead before mauling it. One will never know.

My goatkeeping is usually fairly free of alarms and excursions, but when things are going to go wrong, they do it in a big way.

There were still two does to kid. One had looked for ages as though she was going to drop them any minute, but hadn't, and the other one looked as though she was still ages away from kidding, or freshening as they call it in the States.

Two days after Christina had returned to the bosom of the family, I did the milking, and then got Cameo, the doe that still had days and days to go up in the milking stall to have her little bit of grain. I examined her udder, and said to her that kids or no kids, I was going to have to milk her a bit. I then looked further back to see how she was progressing in the signs that kidding was getting nearer, when what did I see but a half born kid looking at me, so to speak.

I first got goats in 1960 when I still lived with my parents, but when I moved out on my own, I bought a cottage at the beach, and as this was in an urban area, I had nowhere to keep a goat, so didn't have them again until I moved out into a semi-rural area in 1971. Even then, I did not get goats immediately, but have had them now without a break since 1973. In that time, I cannot remember ever having had to deliver kids.

It was lucky that circumstances went as they did on this occasion for there was no way in the world that Cameo could have delivered that kid without assistance from me. When I first saw the kid, it had its head out and one foreleg, but the other one was folded back under its chest.

I pushed the kid back a little so that I could get a finger in and hook that leg out. Once that was done, the kid came easily. During all this time, Cameo showed no interest in all the activity going on under her tail, and continued to eat her grain.

I took the kid and put it in a bed of straw, and got back just in time to deliver the second baby. Still no sign of any concern from the eating end. I am always putting words into my animals' mouths, so I said that Cameo was saying "If you don't like the accommodation I have provided for you, you can leave! Just don't ask for any help from me, you ungrateful little toad!"

I cleaned up both kids and then put them in the mothering stall, and took Cameo in to them. It then became apparent that I had made a mistake in that I hadn't shown the kids to Cameo as soon as they were born. When I took her in to where they were, and mind you, it was only a matter of a few minutes, she said [words in the mouth again] "what am I supposed to do with these little beasts? Never seen them in my life!" which technically, she hadn't.

I plugged them both on to a teat, so that they got a feed, but as time went on, it became evident that Cameo hated one of them. There was absolutely no reason why she should have taken a snitch against it. It was a perfectly healthy little kid, but be that as it may, she would not allow it to feed, and so I had to hog tie her. And here we come to another near calamity.

The next night, I had secured her by her collar, and also had her leg tied to stop her kicking, and in her struggles, she fell, and I then found that I had made another error in that I had tied her collar too high. When she fell, she was strangled.

Boy, wasn't I in a pickle! I tried to lift her to take the weight off her collar, but she had gone completely limp, and I couldn't lift a dead weight, and besides which, I had to get that damned collar undone. I couldn't do both the lifting and unbuckling at the same time.

It must have been two minutes before I got the collar undone, and the pressure released. Wasn't I relieved to find that she was able to get a breath. She lay there gasping for ages, but when I got back with a drink of my special pick-you-up brew, I found that she was back up on her feet, apparently little the worse for her near death experience. I wonder if she saw a tunnel with a blinding white light at the end, as people who have had near death experiences say they do?

Copyright text and material, Jewel Blanch