Labor Signs????

My doe had her kid!
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Alaskan said:
They only need selenium with vitamin E if your area is low in selenium. And if 1) your area is low in selenium, and 2) they haven't been getting any selenium then 3) it greatly increases the chance that the kids are already dead and/or that the kids will have issues and the does will have weak labor/trouble kidding. You really need to figure out if your area is low.
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Alaskan said:
The ligaments don't soften up until right before labor. If they have 1 month to go, I wouldn't expect to feel much, if any, change.
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Congratulations on the live kid! Hopefully, with this forum you will learn more and have good luck with these new goats. Like @Alaskan said - try to find a good vet with experience in goats and sheep.

If you are feeding a grain or pellet type supplement for goats and givng minerals, you probably don't need to worry much about additional selenium. I gave all my does a selenium shot before breeding - do not give extra selenium during pregnancy since the wrong dose at the wrong time can harm the fetus. I currently have sheep and give them all a dose of selenium when the ram goes into the breeding pen. He gets a dose as well.

I had to pull kids a lot because we had Nubians which are known for multiples - 3 and 4 were not uncommon. That many kids get tangled up inside. With 2 kids no problem. With our sheep I had to pull a lot of lambs vecause I was overfeeding. The lambs were too large and the ewes were also "over conditioned". We were feeding alfalfa with a grain supplement. I began cutting back on any grain until the sheephad lambed and had to pull lambs less often. When we moved to Texas the sheep were on pasture. I only grain after they lamb. I haven't had to pull lambs for 2 years now. An "over conditioned" meaning fat ewe or doe has trouble conceiving, often onky produces a single baby, and often has a super large baby that requires help coming out.

You were not specific about the kind of trouble you had with kidding/lambing and deaths of babies. Not pulling lambs or kids in time results in dead babies since there is a time period of a couple hours in which to intervene. After that time the baby is usually born dead due to lack of oxygen, placental separation, etc. If I think the mama is in distress I check internally and if there is a baby presenting I will pull it. Before pulling you have to determine how it is presenting - I had to pull a pair of lambs last year where the presenting legs belonged to 2 different lambs. Both were in the birth canal so one of them had to be pushed back inside. Very hard and required my son holding the ewe up by her hind legs to get enough room to push the one lamb back in against the ewe's contractions. It took over an hour to get thelambs out. Result, one dead lamb and one live lamb. We had come home from church to find the ewe in distress. If I had been there earlier to help, both lambs might have lived. Pulling lambs can result in infections to the mama so when I have to go in I give a shot of antibiotic afterwards.
 
I had many difficulties lambing and kidding most likely due to mineral deficiencies. We often also pulled lambs and kids we most likely didn't need to. We sold our sheep to a friend of ours late last year. The family we sold the sheep to had a 15 lb baby that didn't survive, and I am not even sure if the ewe survived.
 
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