A Goat Named Cloud

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Cloud

Seguin farm family gives baby goat a second chance at life

Story by Sarah Maskal | Photos Submitted by Wendy weber

Life on a farm can present many challenges. For Wendy Weber, there is one challenge in particular that has required a large amount of her time and attention recently.

On the evening of Jan. 8, one of Weber’s goats, a beautiful gray doe named Olivia, gave birth. The first baby to come out was breech and already dead, and when she noticed the second one was coming out breech as well, Weber called her daughter for help. Luckily, the second baby came out fine. They got it cleaned up and called it a night.

A couple of days later, when Weber got home from work, she decided to check on the animals and found Olivia had given birth to another baby. This one was still in the amniotic sac and about a third the size of her sister.

Weber quickly cleaned up the goat and tried to get the mother to feed her, but the mother would have nothing to do with her.

“She just basically would run her over,” Weber said. So the Guadalupe County woman consulted her friends.

“They are real goat people, we’re more cow people,” she said. “They came late at night and we tried to move them all into a stall together and they said, ‘If you don’t take her, she’ll be dead. She’ll be dead in the morning.’”

So the Webers brought the baby goat, aptly named Cloud for her soft fluffy white fur, inside.

Weber placed the tiny kid in a plastic bin in the laundry room on some puppy pads. Their large dog sat at the laundry room door protectively guarding the tiny newborn from their smaller, curious dog.

In the beginning, Cloud was so small they were worried she might not survive.

“She didn’t really have a tail, her legs were all weird, she couldn’t really walk,” Weber’s daughter, Alexandra, said.

The family had to go slow with feeding the newborn, Wendy said.

“She started out where I had to feed her with an eyedropper. She was waking up every two hours and I was feeding her like a thimble full,” she said. “It took about four days, only, for her to go to a regular little kid nipple, which was amazing, cause she was so little. So, she had the suckling reflex, thankfully.”

Cloud eventually started to eat more and grow bigger.

Now, at almost three months, Cloud follows Wendy around anywhere she goes and currently spends most of her time in the house or in the yard.

The young doe does not want to be left in the pen with the other goats. For now, that works out since Wendy is still feeding her, but the goal is to get Cloud acclimated to living outdoors as a regular goat again.

In the meantime, Wendy takes Cloud with her everywhere.

“A lot of people, they’ve never seen one, they’ve never touched one, they’ve never held a baby,” Wendy said. “That’s, for me, what having this here is all about.”

Wendy loves bringing the joy of small-town farm life to people who have never experienced life outside of the city. She enjoys it so much, that she has considered starting up a small day camp to allow children to come out and experience it all.

Her small 5 acre farm is the perfect rural setting for a hands-on teaching opportunity.

Wendy posts all about her farm adventures at BigTreeLittleFarm on Instagram. Whatever the future holds for Cloud and Wendy, you can bet there will be some fun photos of the entire journey.