The Final Cria

Monday night when I was tucking the animals in, I had a feeling Emmy Lou was approaching labor. Her belly was enormous, and she was a bit restless. Sure enough, when I arrived for morning chores the next day, there was an adorable new face! Meet Pratchett, after the late, great author, Sir Terry Pratchett.

He looks a lot like his big brother, Mal, though he's more of a cocoa brown to Mal's reddish brown. He also has some super cute white patches on his ears, base of his tail, and the corner of each mouth. I'll be curious to see if those stay at all--Rose lost the cute white patch on her head when her horns came in.

Baby boy is very healthy and he and Charlotte seem pretty taken with each other already. Even though she's older and weighs slightly more, he's taller!

 

We had some minor drama with mama's teats being way too large for him to properly latch, so he wasn't getting a ton of milk at first. And of course, Emmy Lou is not at all easy to handle like Amber was. We tied her to a fence and Jon had to practically hold her off the ground so I could strip her teats and try to relieve the pressure. I only got about an ounce before we had to give up. As you can imagine, she screamed and kicked the whole time, and even spit a little. 

The next day Pratchett hadn't gained any weight and he was trying to nurse for about 15-minutes straight (normally crias suckle for only 1-2 minutes at a time), so the vet prescribed some mild sedatives for EL to try to calm her down enough for me to milk her out. But her adrenaline overrode even a double dose, so in the end I probably only caused her more stress! Fortunately Pratchett started getting more aggressive at the teat, and everything seems on track now.

 

So far he seems to be shyer than Charlotte, but time will tell!