Goats, Guacamole and Guests: A Deadly Combination

A few things I've learned...

Goats love to nibble your clothing (only while you are wearing it - don't bother trying to give them an old t-shirt as they will ignore it completely). I've often told family members, "Don't worry - they only nibble gently; they never actually rip the fabric." However, I now know this is not always true. If you have friends drop over on a Sunday afternoon and she is wearing a deliciously tempting swirly skirt of a delicate gauzy material, it might be better just to put the goats away. (FYI: This also applies to guests wearing fancy sandals adorned with interesting beads.)

Just because the goats have never jumped onto the table on your deck before, doesn't mean they never will. Especially if you have company. Especially if you have homemade guacamole and tortilla chips on the table. (Apparently goats love the taste of avocado!) Basically, if you can see the top of the table, it is not a goat-safe zone. Feed your guests indoors.

Goats have very sensitive digestive systems. If you are going to change their feed to a different brand, do it gradually (like over a period of several months, or years). At the very least, don't do it the day before having friends stop over for Sunday afternoon guacamole, as the rather plentiful droppings will likely change from odorless-and-easily-swept-away  to large piles of hideous mush that will make everyone in the vicinity swear off guacamole forever!

Sometimes pet owners wonder what our animals do while we are away...I am pretty sure the goat boys are reading Harry Potter (or possibly even taking part-time classes at Hogwarts!)  It has to do with gates... One of the major challenges of "goating" seems to be exiting the fenced area without a goat coming along. We always try to make sure the goats are distracted in a distant part of the yard before unlatching the gate, yet no matter how far away they are, as soon as they hear the oh-so-quiet snick of the latch. there they are at your side. There can be no other explanation than the art of apparating,  that magical process by which Harry, Ron and Hermione travel instantly from one place to another. (Unless, of course, the goaties are hanging out by the gates under an Invisibility Cloak...)

It is interesting to note that the "goats" and "Houdini" both originate from the same Latin root word for "escape" - for this reason we have recently abandoned the gates altogether, instead using an old wooden ladder propped up by the fence, which works well except when carrying full bowls of grain, or for elderly grandparents. So far the goats have not learned to climb the rungs (only a matter of time, I'm sure!).

The Skinny on Worms...

The goat books all tell you how crucial it is to have your goat babies tested for intestinal parasites, a potentially deadly yet unfortunately very common problem with kids (the 4-legged kind, I mean). What the books don't tell you is how to find a vet who that will do this. I spent an hour on the phone, cajoling every nearby small animal vet (well, they are fairly small...) to run a stool sample for me, no success. One agreed, but only if I brought the goat along. No thanks...(Anyone who has ever transported a goat in their personal vehicle would understand.) I finally found a large animal practice some 45 minutes away, but they only treat "meat animals." In desperation, I had to say we are raising the boys to eat.  This is not technically a lie, as there are some days I am tempted...Emily and I actually attempted to run the fecal test ourselves with a yard-sale "My First Microscope," but all the squiggles looked the same and Emily almost threw up...

So, after half a day in the car with a jar of freshly-collected goat poop - the results. Our goaties have a mild case of coccidia (dangerous only to goats) and need a 5-day course of medicine. Turns out the smallest bottle available is the 100-goat "Small Herd" size (not to be confused with the "Large Herd / Owner Must Be a Lunatic" size). As I am maxing out my credit card, the sympathetic clerk says, "Well, at least if you get more goats, you'll have plenty of this on hand." Oh yeah, let me go get 98 more goats just so I can break even on the dewormer!!

A Word About Goat Fencing...

There are many mathematical formulas related to how high fencing needs to be to safely contain goats...but what we have found is this: if you can look up and see the top of the fence, it is not high enough. For about 48 hours after we brought Emerson and Elliot home, they wandered happily in their cozy pen in the garage, making no efforts to escape the three-foot fence I had carefully used to encircle their eating and sleeping area. (Remember, we had been expecting a newborn bottle baby, not 6-week old kids with springs in their feet!) All it took, though, was one trip outside to the picnic table (which they gleefully jumped up and down on several dozen times) and suddenly those rascals realized they had vertical jumps to rival an NBA star. "Jump-the-Fence" became the new favorite game, one they were eager to play all day long. Time for Operation GCP: Goat Containment Plan. Worried about bloat from gorging on all the new grass in the fenced yard outside, I was determined to create a safe and warm  habitat for them in the garage. Alas, no matter what I tried: appliance boxes, boards, upturned dog crates, old gymnastics mats - nothing was high enough. Only when my husband dug from the bowels of the shed several 6-ft. high fence sections (from when we had a labrador retriever) were the goat boys finally beat. Just be careful never to leave anything (chair, crate,  pizza box) next to the fence - all they need is that tiny height advantage and over they go.

Worst Day Ever: Banding and Burning the Boys

The deed is done. All I can say is, OUCH!!! If the goat boys could wear trendy t-shirts instead of just nibbling them, they would be sporting "Life is NOT good" and "Walk in Pain." They were so excited to get out of the van at their original home, frisking around the barn while the breeder and her husband gathered supplies - like a fun field trip!! First there was a quick tetanus booster shot for each, no problem, then time for banding. Sure, says Emerson, I'll sit on your lap, Mr. Nice Man, while the other human uses a metal tool to stretch a tiny rubber band big enough to fit over my...AAAGGGHHH! Elliot!! Run for your life!! SNAP - too late. And we are now the proud owners of 2 banded bucklings, hopefully to stay sweet and stink-free instead of turning into smelly rutting bucks, but what a cost!

And without even time to recover (get it all over with), the iron is hot and three of us hold them each down as the scurs are burned off forever, I am worried Emily might pass out from the goat shrieking and sound of sizzling flesh but I cannot let go to look back at her because if the goat moves, who knows where that iron will hit? It was truly awful but at least it's done. They cry all the way home. So do I.

What else I learned: Aspirin is the only OTC approved painkiller for goats. Although goats will eat almost anything, they will not eat an aspirin, no way, no how. Not crushed up in a bottle. Not even if you hot glue it to a tasty animal cracker. (I will not eat it, Sam-I-am...)

The van, the garage and even the basement (adjacent to the garage) smelled like burnt flesh for days. We babied the boys and gave them tons of extra love. In a week or so they started dancing again. The pain faded quickly. The shrivelly sacs, however, would hang on for weeks...

The Scourge of Scurs: Disbudding and all that...

If you are getting goats for pets (or any other reason, I imagine), make sure they have been disbudded at birth. As I learned, most breeders will use a hot branding-type iron to burn off the horn buds goats are born with, thereby preventing them from developing those long, curling, injurious horns, all the better to gouge you with and rip apart fencing and each other...and Emerson and Elliot came properly disbudded, all good there. Or so I thought. About the time we had bottle success, we began to notice the growth of sharp protrusions from the knobby sites where horns might grow. Elliot's in particular were so sharp that he could slice open an arm or leg if we weren't careful. Back to the goat manuals (I took out every one in the library) - our goats have scurs! Apparently sometimes an excess of testosterone can cause not-yet-neutered male goats to grow their horn buds back, a potential lifelong problem as these razor-sharp projections impale their owners, stable-mates and even occasionally curve downward to puncture their own head. Lovely. Now what? And on the subject of testosterone, looming on the horizon is also the need to have their little-boy parts taken care of, be it by back-to-the-breeder banding (done by placing an extremely tight rubber band around the scrotum until it shrivels up and falls off from lack of blood supply, the most common method but rather barbaric, I think) or under-anesthesia veterinary neutering (costly, and with a higher potential for wound infection). I find myself spending an awful lot of time researching topics I never really wanted to think about!!

How to Bottle Feed a Reluctant Goat: A Two Person Task

How to Bottle Feed a Reluctant Goat: A Two Person Task

Standing up, Person 1 holds goat firmly against her body with goat's head on her shoulder, pinning goat's face against her shirt. (White shirts are not advised for this task - see later info. on "goat clothing.") Person 2 sneaks up behind Person 1 with the bottle, grabs the goat's mouth and forces the bottle in, using the other hand to keep goat's mouth closed. Eventually the restrained goat will begin to suck out of sheer boredom, and you may get him to take several ounces. After a week or so, the goat will have learned the futility of resistance and will drain the bottle just to get it over with. After two weeks, transition to one person being able to hold goat and bottle at the same time. By this point, the goat will be close to the age of weaning off milk, and you can stop. Unless, like us, you and the goats become so addicted to the whole process that months later you realize you are still bottle-feeding nearly full-grown goats, and when they see you coming with bottles they hurl themselves in the air and dance in circles on the driveway before running to take their places on the "feeding swing" - it may be time to seek professional help. When I find a good goat therapist, we'll start weaning.

Getting a nearly-weaned goat to take a bottle is like trying to get your husband to pick up dirty socks after 20 years of throwing them on the floor - a lot of resistance and not much success. Sunday night we couldn't wait any longer, so I carefully warmed 2 bottles of whole milk and took them out to the garage/temporary goat home. How much fun this would be!! However, the goats had other ideas - what is that alien object you are trying to shove in my mouth? I will NOT take that, I am not a bottle goat. That is about as similar to my mother as humans are to tractors. Go away, stupid person. .... I tried all the tricks that usually work with premature infants, but nothing could coax those goats to drink from a bottle.

Monday, Tuesday, we kept trying. They drank plenty of water from a bucket, so finally I just poured some milk in a cat bowl to at least let them get it that way. (Refused - though the cat was happy...) I told Emily maybe this was not going to happen. She was holding Emerson, and asked me to just try again, so from behind her I grabbed his nose and stuck the bottle in his mouth - miracle of all miracles, he took a few tentative sucks. That was it - we were rejuvenated, determined to succeed. Bottle-babies, here we come!

Enter Emerson and Elliot...

There were several other goats for sale - but they were all so...well, big. And nursing from their mothers, no bottle kids here. The breeder pulled aside a pair of frisky kids, the best of the bunch, she told us. Six weeks old, and we could come back for them in two weeks once they were weaned. Oh, I don't think so - I had Emily's money  in my hand and a crate in the van; but did we really want these enormous goats if we couldn't even bottle them?  The cash went back in my pocket. "Well," the breeder said, "they are eating grain, but if you offered them bottles in a day or two, they'd probably take them." I looked at Emily. She looked at the speckled goat nibbling her finger. Sold. Two goats, a pair for $150.00, and we were on our way.

We were supposed to get Bernie...

We were supposed to get Bernie...

Why get goats anyway?  We're certainly not farmers; I don't want to milk them or eat them; we were quite happy with 2 lazy cats...Who knows why? Maybe because when your teenage daughter saves all her money for a year, goats sound so much more wholesome than makeup and ipods; the spectre of leaving-for-college-empty-nest looming in the horizon - it just seemed like something to bond us together.  A fun family activity. A learning experience. Why not? Little did I know...

Until you've bottled, soothed-to-sleep and made dinner one-handed with a newborn goat tucked in the folds of your sweatshirt, you cannot possibly comprehend the lure of goat-raising. We had spent a day at Aunt Karen's Animal Rescue helping to care for her newest aquisitions - a pair of tiny Nigerian Dwarf kids. Rejected by their mother, they were barely 2 pounds each and fully dependent on bottles of milk and human comfort. The little doeling was having an especially hard time taking the bottle - weak, dehydrated  and inconsolable as we tried everything to get her to suck on the tiny nipple attached to a small soda bottle. When she finally caught on near the end of the day, drinking a full 3 ounces and then bouncing energetically around the kitchen, it was an indescribable moment. We celebrated with her and I knew, as a pediatric nurse and mother of premature twins (now teenagers), that our family was meant for this. We needed our own "bottle-babies."

Back home, I searched craigslist and local breeders for the elusive Nigerian Dwarf kids to adopt, finally finding a nearby woman who described her newest "bottle baby," a tiny "raise-in-your-kitchen" buckling (baby boy goat) she called Bernie. Abandoned by his goat mother, he had bonded to humans and was apparently a snuggly sweetheart. She also promised to pick out another goat we could have to be his companion once he grew a bit older. Delighted, we made arrangements to pick him up that Saturday at 2:00, purchasing supplies and preparing his new home.

By the time we reached the farm, Bernie was already in our hearts. Then - heartbreak - as the breeder looked at us quizzically and asked who we were here to see. I explained that, as arranged, we were here for Bernie. She frowned and said that he was gone; he'd been picked up earlier. Apparently someone else had seen her sign and stopped by, and she'd given them Bernie by mistake. (Sick at heart and furious as I was then, I can now understand that sometimes goat-raising does interfere with mental clarity...) There was nothing we could do but look at the other, older goats in the barn. We were not leaving without goats, that I knew.

Welcome to Goat World...

Goats are used for meat, milk, breeding etc - though occasionally some foolish people let their children get them as pets. Do yourself a favor and get a kitten instead. Or a puppy. Or a colicky baby. Goats will consume all your time, energy and  rainy-day funds...but here's the thing. You will fall in love with them and when your children go to school the goats will cry because they want you to hold them, and you will have to explain to your family why there is no dinner and the laundry did not get done. (Although, eau de goat is not a bad fragrance once you get used to it...)

This is our story.