A goat named after ice cream

Once upon a time there was a spunky little goat...  His baby photos caused a new farmer to fall in love with his crazy personality...

He was named after an ice cream flavor because of the chocolate, and caramel, and vanilla coloring of his crazy coat.  Rocky Road.

He came to live at a small farm in Illinois, along with his friend, from the place they were born.

He was not a fainting goat, but just half fainter, and half Nigerian dwarf.  This combination of genetics made him able to leap tall fences with a single bound.  (Unlike the purebred fainting goats, who cannot even leap over a 30" tall hog panel of fencing and who willingly stay wherever I want them to stay...)  

This little goat became an escape artist, and hopped the fence all the time, going wherever he wanted.  He did so whenever we turned our backs.  He leaped and twirled and schemed at every opportunity.

He did what he wanted, and went where he pleased.  He ate the good hay that was supposed to be rationed out.  

He left his friend with....gasp!...the young male sheep while he himself hung out with the flirtatious and tail-wagging female goats...  (Luckily, it was his FRIEND who would sire babies, and he himself was, sadly, thankfully, unable to do so)...

He challenged the little farm dog, who challenged him right back and took great delight in making him jump back to where he belonged. But it wasn't enough for this overly confident goat to break all the rules and challenge the rule-enforcer.

He took over the flock of does (goats), ewes (sheep) and ewe lambs, and became a bully without his buck-friend to keep him in line.  

He stood tall on cinder blocks, watching over "his" charges.  He slept on the roof of the shelter, where none of the other sheep or goats were able to jump.  

He started ramming sheep in the sides after a long day of grazing (full stomachs!), and was seen tossing young goats with his horns.  (Yes, literally hooked one baby with a horn and tossed it a few feet into the air).

His time was up.

From an irresistibly adorable young ice cream flavor, to the brute of the barn yard, in the course of one year...  Power and leaping ability had gone to his head.

I made an appointment with the butcher.  And something came up sooner.

Friends were willing to help out, and had the experience necessary.  I took them up on their offer.  It needed to be done.  

I did not feel one hint of remorse.

Arriving this morning, they got set up in the back of the pasture under a large tree.  

I calmly walked into the middle of the sheep and goat flock, acting as if I was going for a different goat.  Deftly, I caught the collar of Rocky Road and slipped a noose around his neck.  

Happily, he trotted along, anticipating that he was the FIRST to be let out of the barn, the FIRST to be taken out to the pasture (bypassing the usual dry hay that I insist they fill their bellies with before they get any grass).  His arrogance even then was astounding.  

He was handled gently, led gently to the tree, and dispatched....as gently as possible.

A couple of hours later, the friends came to the door with a white bag full of our share of the meat.  

I thought I would be sick, as the friend pulled out chunks of goat meat and enthusiastically explained the quality, the part of the goat it was from, the suggested way to cook it.  Surprise!  I wasn't sick.  I was even a little bit interested.  

I had to rinse the meat before chilling it.  Surprise!!  Not sick in the least.  Kind of curious about the texture.

There was a little bit of hair on some of it.  Surprise!!!  I was OK.  Picked off the hair and moved on with packaging...

All morning, I thought something was wrong with me.  I didn't feel sad for him.  I had no trouble putting the rope on him and leading him out.  

He was not the first nuisance animal that we had to "dispatch", but he was the first one to meet his fate here.  Maybe that made all the difference.  He had lived a good life here, despite making other lives miserable.  And he did not know that anything was different.

No crate to be loaded into, no car ride with panic setting in as he left familiar surroundings.  He was at home, where he had relished his "freedom"...

I did not watch, did not listen to what was going on behind the barn.  I did not help to dig the hole for the remains that were left after the event.  

We did not have goat for dinner tonight....  But I AM thinking of a few recipes to try.  

I AM grateful that the female goats and sheep were able to bed down tonight without trying to avoid a bully who could have injured any one of them with his forceful dominance.  

I AM grateful that no more young kids (goat babies) will go sailing through the air when their only transgression was that they came too close to his royal majesty, as he stood with front hooves on a cinderblock and considered "his" domain.  

I AM grateful that relative peace has once more been restored to the barnyard.  The resident nanny goat will again take her rightful place as the flock bully, but it will not come close to what we saw from this particular wether.

We fed him for just over a year (a costly endeavor!), but he was never friendly, never going to stay within the fence I wanted him to be in, never going to follow the rules of being a good barnyard citizen.  I tried to find a home for him, but when the best option fell through, it was not a moment of panic for his sake, but a moment of realization of what had to be done...  Unlike Brock the mean ram (who I kept around for an extra full year before I could bear what fate was necessary), we did what needed to be done and did not second-guess how we could possibly DO such a thing.  

He had never won my affection, apart from this adorably, cute and spunky photo of him as a young, gleeful kid.  He WAS a young, gleeful kid.   With a mind of his own.

I am sorry that we couldn't find a better placement for him, but surprisingly, I am not sorry that he is no longer out there in my barn or in my care. 

Progress?  Maybe.  There was no hand-wringing or tears shed for an animal that made things difficult.

Rest in Peace, Rocky Road.  Thank-you for the lessons you taught me, and the part of the farm experience that you joined us for.

 

Laura

A sassy doeling

Oh, I almost forgot.  

Along with the "do not touch" sign that the buck ignored on the first yearling female, he also disregarded the important memo/e-mail/text/demand to DO NOT TOUCH the second yearling female.  

So within a week of the birth of bucklings, we had a spunky, sassy little doeling from the second young goat.  

They are "out of season", but surprisingly it has resulted in more interest from customers.  The doeling is reserved already, and is just barely 2 weeks old.  She won't leave until she is 8 weeks old, but the people are adjusting a trip to Chicago by 3 weeks to be able to pick her up...

If she was staying here, I would have named her "Dippin' Dots", because of the perfect row of dots along her spine.  But her new family will name her "Ariel".  

All of which has me thinking (the breeding scheduling part of things)...

I have 3 female fainting goats who were born this spring.  The vet says there is no concern in breeding them as early as next spring when they are one year old.  Why not consider having summer babies next year from the 3 youngsters?  

 When they reach one year old, they are physically capable of carrying a successful pregnancy.  The prolapse with Samoa had nothing to do with the young age (according to the vet).

It was a nice change of summer schedule to have bouncy goat kids born towards the end of summer....although the drama and cost of the prolapse and the resulting vet visit could be left out.

We'll see what the next year brings.  It could all depend on the number of spring kids, and how many we are still feeding when it's time to consider a breeding for the younger ones.

Laura

Two bucklings, and a good ending

A summer story that got lost in the busy-ness:

Samoa is one of the fainting goats I purchased/traded for in 2015.  She is the baby of Mocha, the youngest kid to arrive with the goats from my friend.  

There is a story here....of course.

Sammy was carefully guarded (by me), to keep her from being in the buck's company before she was old enough.  In one short period back in February, she was with the buck, and became pregnant...despite all of my good intentions to protect her from such early breeding.  Luckily, I noted the breeding date on the calendar.  The exact due date would become very important as her pregnancy moved along.

About that same time, she started limping on one back leg, with her ankle turned strangely backward as she hobbled along.  That unexplained injury seemed to get better, but soon afterward her entire back leg started to buckle under her and turn inward.  The vet took a look and flexed that back leg quite a bit, and found that something in her knee and hip joints was not right.  She was not in pain, but the joints "clicked" and the ligaments/tendons supporting each joint seemed to be wasting away.  Her leg started to get even worse, she had trouble hoisting herself up off the floor, and could not keep up with the herd.  

Her fate seemed sealed, but I knew she was pregnant, so we decided to keep her in a quiet area with a friend, to allow her to deliver and nurse her own babies.  

In late June, with one month to go before the due date, she started growing a large udder, causing me to question my record-keeping and consult the calendar and the gestation calculators over and over again.  Because now, she was having contractions, pushing, and showing every sign that she was in hard labor...  (This was the goat I wrote about when Bea was having her piglets)

Soon, Samoa started pushing out a small pink clump of internal tissue.  About the size of a golf ball.  She would have rolling contractions, push and strain, and tissue would show.  Then she would bring up her cud and calmly chew while the tissue was resting on the dirty straw underneath.  This happened over the course of a week, maybe more.

I was stumped, every single symptom of labor and delivery was playing out, and then....nothing.  With hawk-like observation of little Sammy, I realized that sometimes that clump of tissue was also bulging out when she was calmly just lying there, and it would be pulled back in as she managed to bring herself to her feet.

Prolapse.

On the day I was supposed to leave for vacation, I was waiting on the vet.  He was in West Chicago, I was in Woodstock.  I carefully omitted the information about waiting on him before I could drive to join the family....And I waited patiently for him to come and see this little goat.  

I had a photo on my phone, just in case Samoa should choose not to cooperate.  The vet knew right away what needed to be done.

A single stitch with something that resembled a white shoelace.  I got to hold Samoa down.  The vet administered an epidural, then sutured the opening shut, so as not to obstruct normal daily functions but to hold in the tissues that should not be coming out.  

When the stitching was complete, Samoa leaped to her feet and stumbled away indignantly...

Mission accomplished, I headed out to join my family on vacation, while the farm sitter kept an eye on things so that I could have a much-needed break.

Fast forward to the week of July 17....   Samoa was acting like she was going into labor again.  I watched her very carefully.  I would need to cut that stitch at just the right time...

Too early and the prolapse could re-occur and babies be born prematurely.  Too late and...well, the babies could not be born through a shoelace stitch.  The due date became more important than it had been in any of the other births since we started this little farm adventure.

And we got it right!!!  Two little bucklings later, no prolapse during delivery, and although Samoa's leg did not magically heal, she is walking on it better with the pregnancy weight gone.

She needed milking, to bring down the swelling in her nipples.  Her body had thought it was going to deliver babies 5 weeks earlier, and the milk had filled her udder and teats past normal capacity.  The babies could finally get their tiny mouths around the milk-end of things and get that precious colostrum.

Photo is of Samoa and her newborns, and then of the babies yesterday.  Hard to believe they were born 3 weeks ago already, in the middle of puppy-ness, when things were so crazy that we could hardly keep our minds on anything else!

Laura

And the last 2...

So two pups are left.  

Summer (the blonde one) leaves next week for a long trip to Oklahoma.  One of the top English Shepherd breeders in the US had a hand in breeding the father of the litter.  She gets "pick of the litter", and Summer is it!  This breeder has a black and white photo of a farm woman (her great-aunt) on the step of a farm house.  Looking adoringly up at her is a little dog, light colored with white markings.  This is the English Shepherd that Elaine remembers from her childhood.  And while Taffy was a close match, and was almost kept by this breeder because of the resemblance to the small farm dog in the old photo, Summer is a near-perfect match in personality and coloring.  

We are happy that Summer will be a cherished member of this breeder's dog family, and that Taffy was allowed to come to us!

And then little Vader...  He gets to stick around.  He belongs to our daughter's boyfriend.  They are planning a life together, a baby together, and Vader gets to be part of all of that once our daughter and her boyfriend move into their new place.  It is somehow comforting that one of the litter will still be around, and can come to visit once in a while with "Uncle Waldo", our daughter's English Shepherd male.

So we're almost back to normal.  School is about to start, baby season is winding down (although we have one pig litter planned for early October), things are being prepared and planned for winter and for breeding season in October.  Goats and sheep will meet their mates, ducks and geese will be kept off the fall-seeded pasture, the last of the summer straw and bedding will be shoveled out in preparation for winter.  Hay is being stockpiled.  

We will be grandparents in October, when our first grand-daughter is born...  Oh, and Bessie's last calf to be born here should make his or her appearance in October, as well.  

Puppies move on, life keeps rolling along, and there is joy in each step, even if tears are shed for puppies leaving or other such things. 

 

Life is good.  GOD is good.  We are counting our blessings as we look towards October.  :)

 

Laura

More goodbyes

Bailey.  Flint.  Wilma.

These three left in the past few days.

You can see the joy in the eyes of the new families.  

Wilma was hard to let go.  Until we saw just how absolutely perfect her family is for her, and how perfect she is for them.  I had cried over letting her go so many times, until this afternoon when this beautiful family piled out of a van, after a 2 hour trip, and fell in love with my favorite little red and white pup.  

It's been something like that with all of the puppy placements.  The right pup seems to go to just the right family.  It has been a tearful and also joyous time, seeing these little bundles of energy and enthusiasm leaving with their equally enthusiastic families.

Vader (previously known as "Smokey") is staying with our daughter and her boyfriend, so we will still have one bouncy puppy in the area.

Little Summer leaves next week, catching a ride with Taffy's breeder to go all the way to Oklahoma.  Summer will be welcomed by one very happy lady, who has waited for a pup just like Summer for years.  Finally that dream will be a reality.

Joy all around.

 

Laura

Goodbye to puppies...

Dewey.  Molly.  Trace.  Nutmeg.

All of these pups left a week ago.

The numbers dwindled quite rapidly...it was easier to keep track of which pup was where...  Taffy started playing with the pups who were left, because the sheer numbers of little mouths were not seeking milk where there was none.  

No complaints from the new families, only rave reviews and thank-you's.  

Taffy's breeder said to me "Keep sharing that joy", meaning...those pups are making some families very happy, and that is a wonderful thing!

Laura

The beginning of the end...

Pups were 8 weeks old about a week ago.  The first one left this morning.  

It's been a fun, joyful, busy, whirlwind of 2 months.  Pups have been brought so many smiles, so many visitors, so much spunky behavior...  I will admit that we've learned a lot, and have some ideas for "IF" we breed Taffy again....how to better contain these little bundles of energy!  

This litter of NINE has been wonderful, frustrating, and time-consuming.  But...the thought of doing it over again in a year or two is not a terrible one.  

Imagine pups dashing all over the yard, squeezing through the livestock fencing, tearing full speed up and down the long rows of soybeans outside of our property.  It's a joyful thing to see....until you think of the coyote that could be lurking out there, and the fact that outside of the fence is not a safety zone.

Or puppies running here and there in the pasture, when Bessie decides to do her bucking bronco imitation, because the flies suddenly became too much to bear.  Yeah, one pup almost got under a trampling hoof in the confusion.

But...then there have been quiet moments when the pups are all tuckered out, and we sit in the lawn chairs with a pup on each of our laps, just enjoying them, kissing them on top of the heads, watching them lazily settle in under our chairs.

They are a beautiful litter, such great personalities, a huge amount of potential as farm dogs and family dogs.  Each one has developed a different personality (I guess we should have expected that) and we hope that each pup has been matched with the perfect family or farm.  We've actually turned some people away, based on what Taffy's breeder recommended.  It's been hard telling people that one of these pups won't be joining their "faRmily", as some ES people say.

Hoping to get back to some semblance of "normal", with pups leaving.  Lots has been left undone, and there will be a large amount of work to catch up on.  

Carrie and Jake will keep one pup, Vader.  Such a nice little male puppy.

And for now, Wilma is staying.  Her perfect home hasn't come to our attention just yet.

Enjoy the photos.  I'll try (hopefully!) to catch up on other things in the next few weeks, and start typing the summer stories again.

 

Laura