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!!