How To Calculate Your Goat’s Weight

Knowing your goat’s weight can be very important when raising goats. There may be times when you need to dose them with medications or dewormers and you don’t want to guess. Luckily, there are ways to calculate their weight!

Is Your Goat Overweight or Underweight?

For many things a simple visual assessment of your goat’s weight will be enough. Just by looking at your goat you should be able to tell if it’s overweight, underweight, or just right. If you have an overweight goat, chances are you are feeding it too much grain. Let it browse more or eat more hay. Sometimes dairy goats can be underweight, especially when they produce a lot of milk. You may need to add more grain to help them keep up with their production.

To roughly tell if your goat is underweight or overweight, run your hand down their spine. If you feel bones and no flesh, they are too thin. If you cannot feel the individual vertebrae, your goat is too rotund. Don’t judge based on the size of their belly, as that can fluctuate with their digestive system.

What Is Your Goat’s Weight in Pounds?

Don’t estimate your goat’s weight when it comes to medications and dewormers. That can be rather dangerous. If your goat is small enough to be picked up, you can simply weight yourself plus the goat, then weigh yourself alone. If you keep goats as a business, you may want to invest in a veterinary scale.

However, you can calculate your goat’s weight based on a couple of measurements. First take their heart girth. Wrap your measuring tape around your goat just behind the shoulder blades and the front legs. Next measure their length by making a diagonal line with your tape measure from the edge of their shoulder to the bone by the tail. You can visit this site for an illustration.

Multiply the heart girth by itself and the length then divide by 300 to find your goat’s weight in pounds. If you are a mathematical type person the formula would look like this: (A x A x B)/300=C

Heart Girth=A
Length=B
Weight in Pounds=C

For example, if your goat’s heart girth is 20 inches, and their length is 30 inches.

You can also use the heart girth measurement to look up your goat’s weight on a chart without having to calculate it yourself. You can find charts for pygmy bucks and does here and here.

With careful measuring and a simple calculation you can easily estimate your goat’s weight for administering medications and dewormers!

Want All Our Goat Articles In One Printable Place?

If you want all our goat wisdom in an easy to reference, printable format, check out our guide Jump Start Your Urban Homestead With Dairy Goats.

This 37 page digital resource will help you get started breeding and milking your goats, give basic feeding tips, and help you monitor for common health issues. Digital articles are nice, but sometimes I like having things printed out so I can keep it in my goat barn, scribble notes, or not have to worry about my internet connection.

If that sounds useful for you, check it out!