I went to feed Louise yesterday and Barrett was gone. Baby Barrett was missing. We searched low but not high and frantic can’t describe how I felt. I let Louise out to help point the way but no luck. No Barrett. Then I heard a little cry. Baby Barrett had escaped UNDER their fence (I’ll never understand how he fit) and went to visit his sweet Uncle George, our miniature donkey. He had climbed to the top of George’s giant hay-bale bed and fell through – he was literally stuck between and under bales of hay! JP dug him out and George’s company, invited or not, was carried back to his mother, uninjured.
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The animals are more quiet than usual today. The weather is perfect, not to hot but not at all cool and a thin, thin layer of clouds that lay more like a thin blanket in the sky than the cottonball formations, cumulus clouds, whatever you call them and now this is a terribly structured sentence.
Anyhow, it is peaceful, quiet and laid back here today. If I didn’t have to work I’d be laying in the sun on my zero-gravity chair, dozing in and out of the early stages of sleep. But I have to work.
It is so quiet today, in fact, that not even George, the donkey, has made a sound. He is not a fan of the heat or the bugs that bug him as long as the sun is out. Every hour or so I see him saunter out of his lean-to and walk his patrol – he really takes his job, as guardian, very seriously.
Louise and her kid bucks shift between fierce dining sessions and equally fierce naps. I envy them. Louise is eating her cud during her slumber (I am grateful I do not eat and cannot eat in my sleep). As ruminants, goats have four stomachs and it is best for them to lay and rechew their food for about four hours a day. I think she hit four hours of said activity by noon today!
Anyhow, this is what it’s all about. Embracing days like this, when I can say, write, feel and enjoy a peaceful day on the farm.
So this morning I went to the barn, milked Angel. Went to the pasture, watered, tightened the fence line, said my hellos to the goats and their new miniature donkey, George. Came back to the house, drank coffee, filtered milk, packed my lunch, jumped in the shower.
As I got out of the shower I heard some noise outside. Opened the blind. There they all were. My goats, my donkey. Looking at me through the window. The goats had their hooves on the house, peering into the window.
It was cold, mind you. Cold. I dressed. Barely. Didn’t grab my glasses. Just walked out of the house. Right past them toward their field. The goats followed. George, the donkey, well he quite liked the dirt border around the porch and decided to roll in it. I kept walking. He had the nerve to get up, rotate, and roll on his other side.
He then got up and ran to join the group. All but my naughty goat Peanut followed me into their fence line. I wrangled her soon after, closed up the fence only to find the ground wire wasnt connected to the energizer (it electrifies the fence).
I guess they wanted to find me, their mom. And they did. How did they know I was in the shower?
We have been waiting for George, a miniature donkey, for several weeks. This is not an animal with which you can put into the back of a truck and ride off into the wind. In fact, good luck catching one, haltering one, loading one, unloading one so on and so forth.
Nonetheless, he arrived. Scared, bellowing (holy shit are they loud). The shorthairs were all over him, one left crying after a solid kick to the shoulder. He actually went willingly into a stall. He demonstrated, throughout the day, that he has never been stalled. Alone. Or alone just in general.
I put him next to Angel, my rogue goat. She will rush an electrified fence. Or force her way under it. She refuses to be contained. Except in her stall, but there she really has no choice anymore. I removed the built in feeders that she used to leverage herself out of the stall with.
I need these two to be buddies. I need them to want to be together, not with me. Tomorrow brings more containment attempts. HOUDINI LIVES.
Tuesday evening when JP and I were leaving the farm we both concluded that Symphony was very much in heat, very out of season and that I should take advantage of it (for lack of better terms) and try to breed her. So the next evening I made plans to and did the following:
1). Load up Symphony and take her to be bred.
2). Pick up Angel, the new milking doe, along the way.
- Now mind you, a few weeks ago when I moved the goats to OC Acres they broke the back window out of the truck. Now I have to resort to tying them into the back of the truck, which I did.
This is what happened while each were tied to a corner of the truck: headbutting and biting. At one point I looked back and Symphony was just staring at Angel then plowed her head first until the tie stopped her dead in her own tracks. Kinda comical.
Anyhow I set them up in neighboring stalls for the night and put them to pasture this morning. The dominance challenge begins between the four does. Even my sweet girl Louise is in on it, don’t let this picture fool you.
Opie's Goats 