I know a breeder who regularly induces her does over a week before due date because of her work scheduale. Is there any case where this would be the wrong option, and can does have kidding complications of any kind because of this? Or could it harm the kids in any way? Since kids put on a good part of their weight the final week of development, I would question this procedure. I can see inducing because of medical situations or worry that kids might be getting to large to be easily delivered, but what about this scenario? What do you think?

-- Amy (puripada@cs.com), April 04, 2002

Answers

hmm, my gut reaction is, good way to have dead kids, ..

i really cant see this being either a wise or a balanced move, since you never know "positively" when your goat was bred, unless you do AI or implantation...

i cant see this being a possibility for either small scale raiser or medium scale, .. unless you had no need for the kids, which , since most of us count on our kids being healthy and sound, ....

i am baffled as to why this person does this.

while i am terribly impatient and have been telling two does that they are supposed to kid " any day now" ,(they are due the 10th) i have oxytocin , and cant see inducing them...as i want thier kids to be strong and viable.

-- Beth,in ND (famvan@drtel.net), April 04, 2002.

Hi Amy, show season starts here in January, and quite literally you can go to shows every other weekend until June, and then their are fall shows. I could not go to shows with my daughters when they were younger and leave does having babies at home. And milk sales and winning at shows was how I made a profit off my goats. I certainly would not take them with me and have them kidding at the show. So with good due dates, yes we induced, so they would have kids during the week when I was here, and not on the weekends when I was gone. Though a very opinionated, loud mouthed broad (no I am not talking about me :) on the dairy forums will tell you that it causes retained placenta and breeding problems in the future, it simply never happened to us. I have had only one problem breeder in 15 years, and though she was an induced doe herself, both as a kid and her first couple of kiddings, that is 1 in probably 100+. When we first started testing for CAE back in the early 90's the only way to guarantee you were going to be their for the kidding of a CAE positive doe was to lutelyse. 2cc IM and in 36 hours give or take you had live viable kids on the ground. The last thing to develope is the lungs, so you had to be very careful not to induce to early, and to have good breeding dates. It is another one of those management decisions that each of us have to make on our own, with the help of my vet, this is what worked for us, and I took 100% responsibility for the outcome, the reason the vet was willing to give me the drug.

Now with the new information on Dexamethazone and its ability to mature the lungs of the infants, and 2 years ago I learned about Dopram, given under the tongue as drops for respiratory arrest, I would think your friends management is probably much better than ours was years back with just the Lutelyse! Vicki

-- Vicki McGaugh TX (Nubians) (vickilonesomedoe@hotmail.com), April 04, 2002.

Vicki, how long before your goats' due dates do you induce? Do you consider one week before acceptable? I bring this up partly because a couple months back this breeder lost both mom and kid during delivery. I might add this breeder is highly experienced.

-- Amy (puripada@cs.com), April 04, 2002.

We would give the shot a week early, but that would give you 36 more hours to wait, they don't go earlier with Lute unless they were going to go anyway. There is a huge difference in trying to have kids born during 5 days of the week like we did, and her trying to have kids on 2 days on weekends! I would not want to induce that far ahead, if we had a doe who was due on Saturaday and we were going to be gone, we would give her the shot so 36 hours was Thursday morning, so we were only kidding out 3 and 4 days early. And like I said before you can not do this if you do not have really good breeding dates.

Lutelyse did not cause the gal to loose both kids and mom, yes if you give it at all during pregnancy it does it's job, it opens the cervic and expells the contents, it does not affect the doe at all, well other than labor :) Even if it happened to cause retained placenta this can be fixed with oxytocin. I try to answer questions on forums of what I know because it has happened to me, if I do pass on information from what someone else has done or said I try to remember to say that. It's like the WSU site right now they are having a big discussion on sterilizing tattoo digits :) common folks, I have seen your barns, you aren't sterilizing your tattoo digits if you don't even bother to sweep your milkroom floor :) Been one of those days! Vicki

-- Vicki McGaugh TX (Nubians) (vickilonesomedoe@hotmail.com), April 04, 2002.

Milkroom floor, what floor? Ours is dirt... But I do rinse the tattoo digits in bleach between kids.

-- Rebekah (daniel1@itss.net), April 04, 2002.