Therapeutic Interventions: How Much Is Too Much?

I have been really struggling with my conscience lately. It all revolves around the little doeling that I have blogged about before. We have named her Chantilly Lace - we call her Lacy.  When Lacy was born she weighed only about 4.5 pounds - that's about half the size of a normal, healthy goat kid.  She was immediately rejected by her mother who focused all of her attention on Lacy's sister - the 8 pound doeling we named Delilah.  I left Lacy with her mom for as long as I could stand it before I took her away to bottle feed her.  When I brought her in the house I noticed she was bleeding from her umbilical cord - more blood than I would have considered normal. Even more than I would describe as a "significant amount". I contacted our "goat mentor" and was told not to worry about it.  An hour later, with a blood soaked towel in hand, I checked out what I could find on the internet page "Goat 911" (yes, that really exists). Again, it seemed like I was the one making a big deal out of what most would consider a minor situation. The advice I found was to tie off the umbilical cord with dental floss.  I did. It slowed the blood loss down quite a bit, but it was far from stopping it.

In the meantime, I was trying to get Lacy to take a bottle. She just couldn't get the hang of it. I tried switching to different nipples. I tried warming the milk, cooling the milk - nothing. Finally I resorted to tube feeding her.  The above mentioned bleeding stopped after 3 days. After several days, she seemed to be getting stronger.   We would bring her outside and she would run and play with my children. She was your typical bouncy baby goat. Adorable. We finally got to the point where she was taking a bottle for her entire meal - no more tube feeding.

Then, a turn for the worse. She stopped being interested in eating. Taking less and less by bottle and more and more from a tube. Soon it was like all of her strength was gone and she would just lay there. When I would take her outside she would stand - wobbly - and take a few very shaky steps, and fall over. Heartbreaking. I looked it up and figured she had something called "Floppy Kid Syndrome".  A call to the vet was not reassuring when I was told "sometimes you just have to let them go".

So here is my problem. I really wanted to embrace the Nature's Harmony Farm model of letting nature take its course. But I can't seem to let this one go.  As I spend my 3 a.m.'s tube feeding, I wonder if I am doing the right thing. After all, she would not have survived long "in nature" since her mom rejected her at birth. (Obviously knowing something was seriously wrong.) Am I just prolonging her suffering? Not that it seems like she is suffering at all - but how do I know she is not suffering. I don't. And she is not telling me.

So, against my "original" intentions of not stepping in when nature is cruel - I am currently warming yet another bottle of milk and preparing to feed delicate little Lacy through a tube in the hopes that today is the day she will make a turn around. That maybe soon she can join her sister and half-brothers in the pasture and be the bouncy happy kid she deserves to be.

And yet in the back of my mind I still wonder - Is this right?