Let the Games Begin!
November 2nd, 2015 · No Comments · Posted in Blog
Over the weekend we yielded to surging hormones and set our male and female animals free to roam the pastures together. The two rams were released from the orchard, where they’ve been held captive since July. And the goats–three adult females and three sets of twins–trotted off the hill where they’ve been assigned to turn goldenrod into grass.
The rams have to be glad for the extra company after being stuck together all these months, watching the girls from inside the orchard fence. Meanwhile, our boy goat Tigger is confused. He spent the entire summer lording over the female sheep. Now he’s got a personal harem of girl goats requiring his attention. One minute we see him grazing with the goats, the next he’s climbing the hill to the upper pasture, searching for the sheep.
During the re-orientation, one of the rams–Tucker–wound up on the wrong side of our temporary fencing. I can only think that the goat either chased or pushed him through the netting. But Tucker is such a docile fella, it wasn’t any work at all to push him back where he belonged.
We don’t have facilities to separate the very young females, the ones born last April. In a perfect world, we wouldn’t breed them for another year. There’s a chance they could become pregnant now and give birth in the spring–babies having babies. Some of those females will end up in the freezer as meat before then. But I have my on a couple I think we’d like to keep as breeders.
The biggest danger, really, is we lose our resolve to sell or butcher enough. The herd size could easily grow out of control–more than our pastures could feed. Here’s the good news: we’ve sold half a lamb to one of our regular customers (we’ll take the other half). And one of the (Pakastani?) guys who recently delivered a new chest freezer to our house wants to come back and slaughter one of the six-month-old goats for his family.
We’d be happy with a few more customers like him.
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