You Can’t Trick Nature
So back in the fall we made the decision to separate the goats, partially to impact who mates with who in order to manage the bloodline of the herd, but also to control when they are mating. The plan was that the goats would be kidding shortly after our own daughter is born — mid-April or so.
So obviously it was quite a surprise Sunday afternoon when, while I was in the goat pen hanging a new feeder for their grain, my wife screams and I reach for my knife, turning and fully expecting to come face-to-face with a rabid dire coyote twice my size only to find a little baby kid standing alone in the goat’s house, as pleased as he could be with himself.
Apparently our plan had not worked.
By this point he had already bonded with his mother and fed, so we couldn’t bring him inside and raise him from the bottle as we would normally do. This also means he’ll continue to feed off of his mother, and we won’t need to be milking her as much as we might otherwise be doing (which is a good thing seeing as we weren’t exactly prepared for a kid this early, and still have a freezer mostly full of milk from last year). Well that’s one fluke surprise, but surely we won’t be caught off-guard again.
Until this morning, that is, when we were taking their morning hay out and found another little boy that had just been born. Looks like we’ll be doing a bit more double duty than originally planned as we head into our eighth month of pregnancy.
I guess you can’t really trick nature all that easily.
Comments are currently closed.