Today, I was going to go unpublish everything I’ve shared here. I was going to switch to some sort of photo-heavy, cutesy, baby goat blog that doesn’t make anyone uncomfortable…including me. But I ended up spending the morning trying to save a sick kid instead. A really d*mned good, nice coming yearling. The scrubby ones never get sick, I assure you. If your heart is involved, well…f*ck. This one really hurts.
We haven’t made any big changes of late, but Mother Nature did. We went from a ridiculously and uncharacteristically warm couple of winter months to subzero temps day and night, and it stressed some goats.
My oldest matriarch of a doe got sick first. She’s 11, pregnant, and a bit of a princess. When the temps dropped, she went off feed, changed her mind, bloated herself, and then got what I assume is secondary pneumonia, due to either the bloat or the treatment.
She surprised me by deciding to survive the works. She’s rebounded and is doing great. I guess this yearling is the sacrifice to the Gods that I owe for her survival.
The old doe, of course, is carrying three bucklings, mark my words. And of course she didn’t settle when I bred her to my first choice of bucks, so these aren’t even the kids I ordered. (It’s okay. Yes, I’ll keep one anyway. It wasn’t what I planned, but I try to roll with whatever the Universe hands me.)
Of course, your radar is better, your instincts are better, you’d’ve headed this off at the pass. Your pockets are deeper, and your vet knows how to bring back the near-dead. I hate putting these things out there, because the armchair quarterbacks wouldn’t have gotten it wrong. I got it wrong.
This sucks, I hate it, and I’m going to sit here and second-guess my choices and my actions and my place in the universe and the point of it all. I’m mad. This was a really good one.
I chose to write this and share this rather than deleting my blog today, because I saw a post on Facebook from someone who delivered triplets under challenging circumstances, and lost one.
She didn’t know what to do, she called the vet, she panicked, she gathered herself, she went back in and sorted the kids and got them out and saved her doe…and she collapsed in a puddle of tears over a big, dead buck kid who she didn’t get out in time.
You were brave and you did what you had to do. This is a normal part of owning and raising animals. You did good. I’m proud of you.
I spent my life breeding, delivering, raising animals. I like to think I mostly got it right. But one time, I did something to make my Dad mad, and he caught me as I was walking out of my house, looked me in the eye, and told me I didn’t deserve to own animals.
I have a dead goat on my bathroom floor. And I don’t know if I deserve to own animals.
Quit Mansplaining Raising Dairy Goats To Me: A Blog 