Weights, Height & Body Condition
Three different measurements answering three different questions. It's worth knowing which one to reach for.
Where: a goat's profile → ⚖️ Weight
Weight
Log a weight with a date, and the app charts the trend, calculates average daily gain, and computes age-adjusted figures for young stock.
When to weigh:
| Situation | Why |
|---|---|
| Kids, regularly | Falling gain shows up on the scale before anywhere else |
| Before breeding a doeling | She should be at 60–70% of mature weight, not just old enough |
| Before dosing | Most goat medications are dosed by weight, and eyeballing it means under-dosing |
| Through grow-out | For meat animals |
| Any sick or declining animal | Weight loss is objective where "she looks poor" isn't |
Weights display in your preferred format — decimal pounds, pounds and ounces, kilograms, or grams — set in Settings → ⚖️ Measurement Preferences.
Under-dosing dewormers is one of the surest ways to breed resistant parasites. If you don't have a scale, a weight tape is far better than an estimate — and recording what you used means next time you can see whether the dose worked.
Height
Recorded separately, with the measurement point noted:
- At withers — the show standard, and what breed height limits are measured against
- At hip
- Other
Height matters most for miniature breeds where registries impose maximum heights, and for tracking whether young stock are growing in frame as well as putting on weight.
Body Condition Score
BCS is a 1–5 assessment by feel, not by eye — you're feeling over the spine, ribs, and hips. It answers a question weight can't: is this animal carrying the right amount of condition, independent of her frame size.
A heavy goat isn't necessarily well-conditioned, and a full fleece or late-pregnancy belly hides a lot. See the Body Condition Scoring guide for the landmarks.
Late pregnancy and peak lactation are when a doe is most likely to be losing condition and least likely to look like it. Score by hand rather than trusting the outline.
Weight vs. BCS
They can move in opposite directions and both be right. A doe in late pregnancy gains weight while losing condition — the kids account for the scale, and she's drawing on her own reserves underneath.
Tracking both is what catches that.