A New Cria and Goat Impossibilities

We had our last baby of the year. It was born to the most famous llama in the country: our Olivia.

My wife named her Olivia. I call her Ollie for short. Famous? Why famous, you ask?

Surely you've heard of the Ollie Llama?


That shadow on the ground is a new cria. It was pretty dry, but it still had membrane clinging to it at this point.


That makes our fifth llama. The stud was our only registered llama. His papers came with the name Joya. We think that it is probably a Spanish name, so we pronounce the J like H. So I gave him his last name: Doin'. So now we walk up to the paddock and call out Joya Doin'.

Two years ago, we had a little boy baby, Ollie's first. It was born with a windswept deformity, so all four legs were bent in the same direction as though they were blowing in the wind, kind of like this: (( Three of the legs straightened out, so we named him OK. That stands for Off Kilter. He is now gelded.

Last year, we had another boy. His name is Llimpopo. Rudyard Kipling wrote a series of children's stories called the Just So Stories. One of them was about how the elephant got its long trunk. A baby elephant was drinking out of a river when a crocodile grabbed its nose, which got stretched in the ensuing struggle. Maybe elephants have strong necks and weak noses, but llamas have strong noses and weak necks. So when an alligator grabbed the cria by the nose, its neck stretched instead. Maybe. That's what I tell the visiting kids, anyway. Oh.... the name of the river: The Great Grey-green Greazy Limpopo.... hence the name Llimpopo.

We've now determined that this year's cria is yet another boy. We've decided to name him for the retired racehorse jockey that lives across the street, who used to own this place: Leonard M. So we'll name this one Lleonard.... Llenny Llama.

As with any birth on the farm, it is always important to check to make certain the placenta hasn't been retained. For those of you who have never seen this, here's a picture. Warning, fly past this photo if you love babies, but not afterbabies.



Now on to this morning's adventure.

We rescued four goats two winters ago. Their owners were an elderly deaf couple who were in a crippling car accident. One of the goats was a huge goat of unknown lineage. It is the biggest goat that I have ever see and it can jump any fence or gate on the farm when it wants to. We have to hide it during antlerless deer season. It is also, I think the world's ugliest goat with a huge underbite and a couple of missing front teeth. He looks like he took one too many punches in the nose, so we named him Bruiser.

In the goat pen, we have a variety of large run-in shelters along with a small Igloo brand plastic dog house that our pygmy goats and geese like to lay in. I went out this morning, and somehow Bruiser had squeezed his huge body into that little bitty dog house and got wedged in. He must have gone in head first and turned around, but based on the size of the goat and the size of the house, that's utterly impossible. The lower lip on the doorway made it so that his legs were pinned in. He was well and truly stuck.


I struggled and pushed and pulled. I got one leg out, but he pulled it back in. (Now I have had my practice session if I ever have to pull a baby goat during labor.) He grunted and pushed and squirmed. No go. I finally decided that I was going to have to take the house apart to get him out. Finally, though, he gave one last heave that buckled the plastic, popped out and immediately emptied his bladder.

BIG STRETCH. Man, it must have felt good to get out of there! Now he seems none the worse for wear and is back to his old happy self again.

Now I'm curious to see where he tries to sleep tonight.

Goat Transport and Real Border Collie Work

I have run across a couple of things recently on my blog visits that I just have to share.

Unfortunately, I can't remember where the first photo came from, but it reminded me so much of my days in Ghana, West Africa, that I had to save it. Goats roam freely everywhere you go. The Ghanaians transported them any way they could and you see goats tethered on the roofs of buses and tanker trucks. Any of you with goats ought to appreciate this photo.





Next, I have long wanted to attend a sheep dog trial, but we simply don't have any near enough for us to attend. Then I visited Susanne Iles' blog at http://ringofbeara.blogspot.com/ from County Cork, Ireland. She has flocks of sheep roaming the farms all around her place (and sometimes in her garden), and the shepherds still use dogs to move the flocks. She has a wonderful site with photos, and she posted the following footage of shepherding from Wales. It's worth a look:

Hope you enjoyed them.

Escape/Break-in Artists and More Work

I went out to get our dairy goat the other night only to find all of the goats in our yard decimating my wife's newly planted shrubs and plants. It sure doesn't take them long.


It turns out that Deb had felt sorry for the goats in their grassless paddock and wanted to let them out in our woodlot paddock to graze on all of the tall grass there. Well, they found the weak spot in the fence. I had opened up a portion to transfer firewood to our furnace shed last year, but never got around to building a gate for it. Instead, someone had just salvaged an old piece of plywood from the scrap heap and leaned it in the opening. I guess the grass is always greener on the other side, so they say.


Each day Deb poses the following question (usually several times a day): "Isn't it about time you ___________?" It's a farm, so it isn't hard to fill in the blank(s).

So, that day it was, "Isn't it about time you built a gate for that gap?"

Sigh. "I guess."

Now to come up with the lumber for the job. A few days earlier, the question had been: "Isn't it about time you replaced those fence boards that the horses have been gnawing on?"

And I replied, "I guess" with a sigh.

I can't be certain, but I have my suspicions that the horses are attending evening seminars presented by our North Woods beavers. They seem to have the gnawing part down pat. Now if they could only learn some engineering from those rascals.


So now in the barn, I had a modest stack of old hemlock fence boards that needed to be repurposed. OK. Now how do I design a goat-proof goat stopper out of old fence boards that lives up to Deb's aesthetic sensibilities?

After some head scratching and chopping and sawing, this is what I came up with:

I'm hoping they won't fit through those holes. So I used my universal stain around the farm: Any surplus, on-sale, discontinued, outdated can of deck stain that I can buy for two or three dollars a gallon tinted with enough lampblack pigment to turn it black.

Me cheap? Only when it comes to buying fancy cameras that are so big and heavy that they won't shake in my hand.

Well, I got 'er mounted in the hole and will have to put 'er to the test as soon as I get around to herding them out of the pasture with the cows.




I have no idea how they got out there this time.

"Oh Debra, dear. Have you by any chance been feeling sorry for the goats again?"

Cold Weather Kidding and Freeze/Thaw Season

After reading about the birth of Harry in warm weather on The Maaaaa of Pricilla, it made me think that we should figure out a way to have our kidding season in warmer weather....

March 6, 2009

Yup. As usual, the -20 F weather did its job. Patches, our dairy goat, dropped two wet, slimy baby kids on the eve of one mighty cold night. When I went out to do evening chores, there they were, wobbling around in the stall with Patches kind of staring off into space as if asking herself, "Why me? Why now?"


By the time we found them, the hair on their little tails was frozen, so Deb had me run in and throw some towels into the dryer to warm. Then it was out to the barn to thaw out and dry off the little slimy ones.

Patches did not like that process at all. I sat on a bale of hay doing my farmerly duty. This bale-sitting position perfectly and strategically placed my kidneys precisely at Patches' head-butting level.

Bam! Bam! Bam! (Now I know why kidney punches are outlawed in professional boxing.)

Well, the babies made it through that frigid night with mom under a heat lamp just fine, and Patches is now not so worried about us playing pass-the-babies. Now they are up and bouncing off the walls. They also do a lot of their own head butting right into Patches' fully distended bag to stimulate milk flow. That'll teach her.

Shortly after every birth, there are a couple of other vital little tasks that need performing. One is to check to make certain that the placenta(s) pass in their entirety. A retained placenta is not a good thing. A cow will eat hers if given the opportunity. Patches has more sense than that, so we were able to determine that everything was OK on that score.

Another thing is to watch and make certain that the babies' first poop (the meconium) comes out after a few good feeds. Unlike later feces, meconium is composed of materials ingested during the time in utero: intestinal epithelial cells, mucus, amniotic fluid, bile, water and lanugo. Lanugo is a fine downy hair that grows on fetuses as a normal part of gestation, but is usually shed and replaced by vellus hair toward the end of gestation. As the lanugo is shed from the skin, it's normal for the developing fetus to consume the hair as it drinks from the amniotic fluid and urinates it back into its environment. The lanugo contributes to the newborn baby's meconium. Meconium is almost sterile, unlike later feces, is viscous and sticky like tar, and has no odor. It should be completely passed by the end of the first few days of postpartum life, with the stools progressing toward yellow (digested milk). (Are we learning a little bit more than we really have to yet? Just wait. There's more.)

One of the babies is a nanny, and the other a buck. I have yet to detect whether the nanny has pooped yet or not. She may be far too discrete for my random observations. The little buck, however, developed a walloping case of Shitzu-butt. Shitzsu dogs have a tendency to cake up their behinds so badly that nothing can get out. The offending obstruction must be physically removed. (Just ask Bob Barker, our Schitzu/Miniature Dachshund mix. He got the wrong end of the Shitzu genes.) Well, the little buck had the same thing, but with yellow tarry meconium that barely came unglued, let alone dissolved in hot water. I had to actually abrade the tar that glued itself to the tub after the procedure.

When we had him in the house, in the tub, woefully succumbing to what was debilitating humiliation (to me, if not the goat), Louise's hospice nurse, Sue, showed up.

"Oh, isn't he just the cutest thing! Let me dry him off."

"Sure."


That was a mistake. I'm not going to tell you how hard it was to pry the baby loose, but it is a well-known fact that most primate mothers, especially chimpanzees and gorillas, jealously hold on to their infants for the first six months or more of life.


It took some convincing, but strictures and covenants (implied, if not specifically written) against baby goats in hospice corporate cars and private apartments won the day.

That's the thing about baby goats. They are born knowing how to work a crowd. The hummingbird-rapid tail wag, the head toss, and four feet in the air standing bounce are enough to turn even the hard-nosed cynic soft-in-the-head and weak-in-the-knee.

So without further ado, I would like to introduce: She-Nanny-kins (pronounced shenanegans), our baby girl

And Buck-aroo, our baby boy.


AND THEN

A few days later, the weather turned warm finally. I hate that. This place turns into an icy mess with thawing in the daytime and refreezing at night. With the ground still frozen, there is no place fcor the meltwater to go except into pools and puddles both in and out of the barn. That's the worst of it, if we are lucky or smart enough to forgo the other problem.

Did we drain the barn plumbing? Did we keep the loft heated enough to avoid freezing? Did we keep the faucets dripping to keep them flowing?

This year we bought a fancy, schmantzy, new high tech, nationally advertised, electric heater for the loft apartment/office/dog house that was supposed to save on heating bills and be guaranteed not to burn the barn down. It didn't burn down the barn, but it sure burned through our electricity budget. To keep the barn loft minimally heated (barely above freezing) we were paying more than $400 a month in electric bills. And as the winter wore on, we kept trying different techniques to lessen the energy required, like just heating the loft bathroom instead of heating the whole loft. Then we tried turning off the dripping faucets in case the drain happened to freeze.

Yesterday, I walked out into the barn to find that the loft pipes had thawed and ruptured and there was four to five inches of water in all of the stalls on one side of the barn. Patches and her babies had to be rescued from a high spot just like those Katrina victims on the rooftops, only without all of the "resources" made available through FEMA. I finally got the water turned off, and the water heater and plumbing drained, and most of the insulation downstairs tacked back up, and fans blowing to dry out the feed room, and maybe someday I might let Deb back into the barn to see what happened.

Einstein was right again. He said, "There are only two truly infinite things, the universe and stupidity. And I'm unsure about the universe."

Oh well. We'll try again next year. As Red Green says in his Man Prayer:

I'm a MAN...
But I can change...
If I have to...
I guess...
Amen.

Love's Labor Lost

A slightly truncated and modified version of the following story was published as "Love's Labor Lost" in BackHome Magazine (Sept/Oct 2006).

May 23, 02

We bought a brand new eight-week-old Jacob ram last week at a swap meet. He's a tricolor beauty. When full grown, he will probably have four horns, so we're calling him "Fororner". Hopefully he will grow and breed our Jacob ewe, but right now the ewe keeps it at a distance. Of all of our animals, the one that the young ram seemed to think was its mom right off the bat was our Golden Retriever, Riley.

We became interested in harvesting wool after an incident two weeks ago. We have two Angora goats, a buck and a doe, that we put together to breed last fall. All winter we watched and waited and came to the conclusion that there were to be no babies from them this spring. One Saturday, my wife went out to turn out the sheep and goats into their pen, and the Angora doe refused to come out of the stall. This was extremely unusual for her. Instead, she had her head tucked around on her side, was grunting/bleating, and was backing up against the wall. We thought, "By golly, this goat's in labor! She's going to have babies after all."

So we bundled up my wife's mom and called some neighbors in to watch the event. We wrapped up in blankets and sat in lawn chairs in the stall, and waited. Now, goats are a bit skittish to begin with, and we really didn't want to interfere and get her upset. We waited and waited. The goat would lie down and get up and squat and pass urine, and defecate, all the time looking at her side, and groaning and backing into the wall.

Finally, I went up to check her out, only to discover that the darned goat had a hunk of wool wrapped around one of it's lower teeth, and couldn't straighten her neck out. When I unflossed her incisors, she straightened right out and made a beeline for the stall door to join her pals.

We spent the next few hours shearing that goat.

After the horse and sheep incidents, we are gaining quite the reputation in the neighborhood. P.T. Barnum stated that "...the common man, no matter how sharp and tough, actually enjoys having the wool pulled over his eyes, and makes it easier for the puller." I had no idea he was talking about us and our goat.