About a month before a goat is due, most will start to develop an udder. It starts out so small that you wouldn't even see it, but if you feel between their hind legs, the udder area starts to feel a little puffy. As they get closer to their due date, the udder gets larger. In this video, you will see goats that started to develop an udder three to four weeks ago, which means they are getting fairly close to kidding. We check them twice a day (morning and evening) to see if there have been any sudden changes in the udder. These does' udders probably won't change a whole lot until a day or so before kidding at which point they will fill up suddenly.

We also check tail ligaments. This can be very confusing for those new to goats. Many people think it just means the muscles around the tail head, but the ligaments are about the size of pencils and just as hard. There is one ligament on each side of the spine that goes from the spine to the pin bones. I point these out in the video. Although the muscles will get a lot softer for a week or two as the goat gets closer to kidding, it is the ligaments that don't get really soft until 24 hours before kidding.

Ligament myths and misunderstandings:

If someone says their goat lost their ligaments two weeks before kidding, they were actually feeling the muscles, not the ligaments.

You may also hear someone say that their goat lost their ligaments yesterday, and now they're back, but in those situations, they just missed the ligaments yesterday and today they found them again.