Nitro

Nitro was Monkey girl's first market goat.  She worked very hard with him getting him ready for her first time at our local fair.

When we first started our goat project we were looking around like crazy trying to figure out where we would get Monkey girl's first market goat.  Then one day we received an email from Monkey girl's 4-H goat project leader telling us that one of the local Boer goat breeders had a kid that was on the bottle and needed a new home.

At first I passed up on the email.  I  thought raising a bottle baby market goat was a crazy idea.  After a day or two went by Monkey's dad came home.  I told him about the email.  We talked about it for a long time before the critters came home from school.  In the end we decided to go for it and see how it goes.  We got out the kennel, picked up the critters and made a few phone calls.

Our critters were so excited to go get a baby goat.  We picked him up and took him right to the store to pick up the supplies we needed.

The first day of getting him to take the bottle was very difficult.   On the second day we finally got him to latch on to the bottle and drink up.  After he finally got the hang of bottle he started eating up lake crazy after that.

We told Monkey that she could name her goat whatever she wanted but that we had veto power if we didn't like the name.  Monkey has been really big into Minecraft and we didn't want some crazy name.  In the end Monkey picked out a great name for her first bottle baby market goat; she named him Nitro.

Monkey was so excited to have her first baby goat she opted to stay on the shoe bench in the entry way right next to him  She slept there all night with her blankets.  In the morning we found her on the sofas.  She said she liked sleeping close to her goat but the shoe bench was really uncomfortable and hard.  The shoe bench is made of wood and so her reason for moving made me chuckle.

We left Nitro in the entry way of the house for just over a week.  Then I decided it was too messy for him to stay in the house and he was moved out into the garage.  I already work to hard to keep the house clean.  Cleaning the house up after a goat was too much for me.

As time went by we became a lot better with the bottle feedings.  We learned a trick that help us a lot.  We started feeding Nitro under our legs like he would suckle from mom's udder.  He took right to it.  He started to gain weight and make great progress toward his fair body. 

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