# Can goats eat carrots?



## Cornhusker

Ok.
We have goats, we have arrived, we are real homesteaders.
I guess.
I have a million questions, but the most pressing is: Can Goats eat carrots?
We have goats, we have carrots.
Advice please?


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## Caprice Acres

They love carrots. They love any plant matter. doesn't take much to please a goat!!


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## caroline00

ours never would but maybe they knew that we got trailer loads for free...sort of like a teenager... its the cost that matters


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## titansrunfarm

Two of mine eat carrots, one doesn't.


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## GrannyG

Mine love carrots, they eat anything !!!!! If I have to try to get a pill down one of them, I make them an apricot or peach jelly sandwich and put the crushed pill in it, they eat it like candy, no problems. We also feed ours bread, a couple slices each, and they love it. They eat the leaves that fall in the goat yard, my neighbor mows his lawn and dumps the clippings over the fence for them and they go through that, and they even eat the pecans that fall in the garden if they get to them before I do.We also give ours alfalfa pellets and goat and kid pellets. They are well fed.


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## Westwood

Sure! If they don't like them, wrap them in anything you don't want them to eat and they'll love 'em.


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## Rachel K.

It won't hurt to try. Some Goats Love Carrots while some would rather go without. I have yet to try Carrots with my Goats. I have tried Bread, Bananas, Apples, Tomatoes, and Cucumbers, all of which they loved. They also love Horse treats.


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## Hip_Shot_Hanna

Er.. I can't recommend you feed them potato salad, but mine loved the stuff. I threw some over the fence, never thinking anything would eat it, and they gobbled it right up, no ill effects. Also if they were loose and the dog had food in his bowl, they would eat that too. (Course, back when I had goats about twenty years ago, I fed inexpensive dry dog food at the time, and it was mostly corn.)


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## Caprice Acres

When I give my goat's treats, I split a bag of skittles between me and them. They get a sugar high alot easier than people, so they get all hyper after one or two.  it's funny to see them tearing up and down the pasture at top speed. I used to have two truck tops adjacent and they could usually jump to the other if they stood right on the close edge. When I gave Daisy the skittles I guess they made her more brave and stupid because she ran to the first truck top, ran twice on it and then in the middle tried to jump to the other one. I belive mid-jump is when she figured out that she hadn't thought it through correctly, and freaked out. somehow her head hit first but lightly, and her butt gracefully followed, hitting the truck top with a hard smack so she was upside-down and cracking the windows on the sides. You should have seen the look on her face when she got up. then she walked daintily to the other side of the pasture and was too embarassed to come into sight for a little while.


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## mpillow

Can you ever feed them enough carrots? Not on my farm.....mine love carrots!!

I read somewhere too that they have positive effects in warding off worms when fed in large quantities.....not sure how true....I did read it somewhere.

Be careful your fingers are not mistaken for a carrot !


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## tngirl

Ours love carrots, but they usually wanted to pull them straight out of the garden (nto a good idea). Their favorite treats are raisins and garlic croutons. Have you ever smelled a goat's breath after a snack of garlic croutons?


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## Jen H

Mine love carrots, green beans, spinach, squash.... basically anything growing in the garden that I don't want them to eat. The youngest one also likes coffee. The last thing a 7 month old goatling needs is caffeine. :baby04: 

The best, most wonderful food of all, though, is the hay out of the chicken's nest boxes.


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## Rachel K.

Hip_Shot_Hanna,

Not to sound like a jerk or anything but Dog food really isn't good for Goats.


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## Jillis

tngirl said:


> Ours love carrots, but they usually wanted to pull them straight out of the garden (nto a good idea). Their favorite treats are raisins and garlic croutons. Have you ever smelled a goat's breath after a snack of garlic croutons?


Never mind the BREATH! What happens to the MILK?!?  


BTW---I thought I was soooo smart---I gave my goats their ivermectin in their grain---it worked SWELL! :happy: I have no desire to do it the way my friend showed me to. She straddled the goat (only 4 months old---what about full grown?!?) and forced her mouth open, held it in a certain way so those brush-biting teeth wouldn't slice off her finger, jammed it into the goat's cheek and then held her head up and stroked her throat until she swallowed it...what for? My greedy goats love their grain so much---and at the fence there is so much competition! I had to be sure I didn't give one goat two doses! Only my finicky little Chrysanthmum curled her lips a little, but she ate it! YAY! YAY! YAY! I was soooo proud of myself! (Now I hope some very experienced goat person doesn't reply to this with some arcane reason why you should never worm your goats this way!  ) I also gave my baby her penicillin shots while she got her bottle. She didn't even notice---while if I just had my son restrain her it was much harder (and she was only 10 lbs. mind you!). I'll have to remember to pill in the jam sandwich trick. Although that will certainly give a sugar rush too, if only one or two skittles will do it!
Anyway, I gave my goats a pumpkin after reading on this forum that they like it. They ate most of it---just tore it off in strips and wolfed (or should I say goated?) it down...I'm gonna try carrots next. My Nigerian Dwarf Doe who is the only adult I have LOVES bananas and apples. The Alpines and the Nigerian just sort of nibble at them and don't really go for them, yet. Of course, anything that hits the ground is done, nobody will touch it then. The pumpkin was okay, because it was "in the shell" and the shell pieces were in the ground. And can anyone tell my why my goats prefer their hay "al fresco"? I put some outside the fence today where they could eat through the fence and they finished it off and that night I really didn't have to replenish their indoor feeder much at all...interesting, eh? 
My goats like sunflower seeds, and I am going to try raisins--- just bought some with my goats in mind. They love when we throw tamarack and cedar branches over the fence. They've eaten all the lower branches in their pen. And cedar, I have been told, is a natural wormer...
Sigh...I love my goats...I am as boringly obsessed as a new grandma is over her grandkids...just stop me when I go on too long...
Jillis!


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