So, you want to start breeding Nigerian dwarf goats. Shortly after I got my first two goats, Phoebe and Mike, I knew I wanted to start breeding. The problem was that Phoebe and Mike were unregistered, which affects the amount you can sell babies for. They were also brother and sister. My problem became, I gotta get moar goats! which is a great problem to have! Unless you ask my husband.
We quickly amassed more goats. By year’s end I had three more doelings and two more bucklings, all registered. My bucklings, Oscar and Felix—plus our token Boer, Bart, that my brother-in-law rescued, were all confined to their own pen where they watched longingly as my does went through their first heat cycles.
We waited until our does were one year old and 40lbs. Some people wait until they are bigger, but our does are quite petite. I think their max adult weight won’t be much over 50lbs.
Heat Cycles
Nigerian dwarf goats are unlike other goats in that they go into heat roughly every 21-28 days. This means they can breed year-round! You don’t have to wait for the fall season like with Boers and Nubians, among others. You have a little more control over when you’ll have babies. We intend to have babies in the spring and fall next year.
The best way to make sure you have specific breeding pairs is to separate the ones you want to pair. For this you’ll need a third pen. Yes, a third. One for the does, one for the bucks, and one for the romancing pair. You can keep the pair together for a month and will likely catch a heat cycle, but I chose to keep them together for two months to make sure they got pregnant.
Gestation
Nigerian dwarf goat gestation is roughly 150 days, or five months. This might seem long to those who breed dogs because for all intents and purposes, Nigerian dwarf goats are basically dogs. Just joking, they are ruminants with a lot of the same traits as dogs!
Your pregnant does won’t show for a long time, close to the end of gestation. Plus, with Nigerians generally rotund physiques, it’s doubly hard to tell! I learned from Crystal at Blue Cactus Dairy Goats, that goats carry their babies on the right side—an easy way to remember, according to Crystal, is right is rugrats, left is lunch. I haven’t forgotten that!
Pregnant Polly 
Pregnant Phoebe
Around 3-4 months into the gestation, if you put your hand to your doe’s right side and press, you might be able to feel the babies moving.
How to tell if your Goat is Pregnant
If you don’t want to wait until she starts to show or the babies start kicking away, you can get testing done by your vet. There are blood tests that will show if a goat is pregnant. The only drawback to that is, it could become a “false” positive if the goat miscarries.
You can also get an ultrasound of your goat! My vet comes right out to the farm and ultrasounds our goats for us. You’ll want to wait at least 30 days from when you suspect they might have bred, which can be difficult to tell. It’s also not 100% accurate because goat babies like to hide in there. We thought that we were getting a possible 3-4 babies this past kidding season, but we ended up with 7, two of whom came from a doe that we thought wasn’t even pregnant.
My plans for kidding in 2022 are going to be different. In 2020, we bred them all because we weren’t sure that they would get pregnant. They did. They ALL did. This year we intend to breed two does in October, then two in November, in order to stagger the kiddings. Then, if some of our doelings from 2021 are big enough, we might breed two of them in March. They will be over a year at that point.
Check out my post about what you’ll need to bring home your first goats!
I intend to write an in-depth article about our kidding experience, so stay tuned!
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