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Thursday, 26th February 2015
And here are our latest and indeed our last pygmy kids for this year: meet Grape and Plum, born around 1pm this afternoon to Parsley and, unbelievably also BOTH girls. This means we now have a very happy, bouncy group of EIGHT female kids - not a single male to be seen. In fact the only male we had was the poor kid that died inside Onion.
In all mammals, including humans, it is the male who determines what sex any offspring will be. You may know something about genes (these get passed from parents to offspring and are to do with how we look and behave). All male mammals have the potential to pass on either male or female genes whilst females can only pass on female ones. The chances of having male or female offspring ARE the same but it CAN happen that some individual male mammals are more likely to pass on female than male genes (or indeed the other way round).
The father of our kids was Marmite and so it looks as though he was very good at passing on mainly female genes. When it comes to breeding livestock this is very good news as females are much more popular because of course they can then be used to breed more offspring. In addition, for most livestock you only need one or two males for lots of females.
Parsley needed a little help giving birth as Grape, out first, had a HUGE head and her front legs were pointing backwards which meant her shoulders got stuck. Once we helped her out, Plum followed incredibly easily. Both kids needed a little help to find mum's teats but Plum needed no more help after that. She had the most enormous first drink and her tummy became full and warm really quickly.
Within half an hour, both kids were walking around, virtually dry and had each had several drinks: fabulous. We also noticed that Grape is bigger and heavier than Raisin (born yesterday) and Fig (born the day before). Now we know why Parsley was so enormous when she was pregnant. We expect she is very pleased both kids are now born!!
See the Pygmy Goat kidding 2015 section for more.
