A Shot, a Bath, and a Run Down the Hill

All in all, not a bad goat day. We trimmed hooves, gave Elliot an injection, and scrubbed both goats in lime sulfur again. The boys are once more stained a greenish-yellow hue and stink almost worse than the chicken manure the farmer across the road spread on his fields today, but at least their feet are beautiful. Hoof trimming is one of those tasks which creates a great feeling of satisfaction, the difference between "before" and "after" is so extreme. It's like when you clean your refrigerator after neglecting the chore for way too long, and you open the door to - wow! Did we get new appliances or something?

Last week our vet sedated Ellie to perform skin biopsies; the samples were sent to a goat pathologist at a laboratory in an Ivy-League institution. Finally the results are back - inconclusive. No mites were found in any of the specimens, although there was tissue damage suggestive of mite activity. Fortunately there was no evidence of any dread auto-immune or genetic diseases, and sometimes skin problems in goats are caused by zinc deficiency, but it seems the elusive mites are still our number-one suspect. (Yes, the goats do get supplemental zinc...)

So we will continue the lime sulfur baths for another few weeks and see what happens.

This afternoon I really should have cleaned out the refrigerator, but instead I took the goats on a walk. I opened the gate for them, and Elliot took off down the hill in ecstasy, flinging himself sideways into the air in great gleeful leaps as he hurtled toward the most wonderful weeds in the world. Moments like these are the reason I have goats.

(Well, that and the fact that I haven't yet convinced my friend Theresa that two goats would be the perfect addition to her backyard menagerie. I think I read somewhere that the presence of goats around chickens can increase egg production by fifty percent...)