About VanEden Goats

These pages have been set up to talk about the adventures and misadventures of our life with goats.  These are not just any goats, but Nigerian Dwarf goats, the littlest dairy goats.  Yes, dairy.  Ours earn their way by providing milk for ice cream and cheese.  That is the material gain.  However, nothing can match the emotional gain of the love and attention these little goats give us.  You will find many links to other sites here for more information about these sweet little goats in general, but first, about mine.

First arrivals:

• Capri (Capriola RB Italian Sunset [DOB: 8/12/09] – AGS D49032)

• Summer (VerandaBeach CRW Summer Daze [DOB: 1/7/11] – AGS: D-55336)

Capri is Summer’s mother and was due to kid at the end of the month.  Summer is one of triplets born a year before I bought her.  She was the single doe with two brothers.  Summer was left with her mom and was dam-raised versus being taken from her mother and bottle-fed.  Dam raised versus bottle fed is a controversial subject among goat owners with both having valid arguments – mine are dam raised whenever possible as my core belief is that mother knows best how to care for her own babies, human, goat, dog, cat, etc.; I need a good reason to separate babies from moms.  However, each person must do what is best for her/his own circumstance after considering all factors.

It is often said that the best thing about goats is how smart they are and the worst thing about goats is how smart they are.  Early on, I found that to be very, very true.  Capri is exceptionally smart even for a goat which she proved repeatedly.  It seemed that she could get into more mischief than a kid!

Capri would readily come to me while Summer was quite shy and reserved.  Summer liked to spend more timing looking over the situation.  Capri was to be my milking goat after her babies were born.  She had never been milked before and I had never milked a goat before.  I was very soon to learn that milking a goat was quite different from milking a cow.

Where does the name “VanEden Goats” come from?  VanEden is my herd name.  My goats are registered and I needed a herd name to transfer ownership of my girls from VerandaBeach at the registry.  How I chose VanEden is discussed in an earlier post.  https://vanedengoats.wordpress.com/page/3/