As we continue to ponder our goat plans, Pluto is causing a little bit of concern. As we mentioned, we were going to weigh him on Tuesday. A week ago he was 9.6kg, in an ideal world we were hoping for near-ish to 11kg and so it was with a mixture of shock and disbelief that yesterday the scales read 8.6kg: a whole 1kg lighter... Our first thought was that we got the 9.6kg wrong, which is entirely possible and our second thought was that he may have initially LOST a lot of weight through the stress of losing him mum, but then began to put it back on. He is looking and behaving fine and showing no signs of ill-heath. He is quite skinny still but then so is Mars and he does have a jolly good play at times so must have energy!!!
Having said that, he is NOT perhaps as lively as Mars (albeit he is ten days younger) plus since Monday evening, he has started to be a bit fussy about his milk and as such has NOT been taking his full litre of milk each day! Today we ordered some ‘goat replacer’ milk that other alpaca owners swear is perfect for bottle feeding to cria (although one would have thought that ‘real’ goat’s milk would be better.. but there we go..).
Rachel from Market Vets is here on Friday so we will ask her to check him out for us and in between times try to get him to drink more. Today he has been up and down, took only 50ml at a time in his morning feeds, then gobbled done a full 200ml at tea time and then showed no interest after that!! In total this amounted to just 700ml – definitely not enough.
Fingers crossed he will take to the milk replacer!