Goats!
Saturday, May 30th, 2009As I begin to write this, we’re traveling North on I-35 in Hinckley with three goats in the back of our Expedition (I usually refer to it by its model name rather than vehicle type because I hate the word “SUV” and truck to me means pickup). They’re in a dog crate with straw in the bottom. We just picked them in Hastings from a very nice family with a beautiful farm. I found them on Craigslist and conversed via e-mail with their daughter about buying them. They raise goats and show them, but they show females and tend to get rid of the males to keep their herd size down. Ours were the last three without homes, and they were destined for the meat market if they couldn’t be placed. We’ve been planning on getting goats at some point, but probably not for another year or two. But these little guys were so adorable that we couldn’t say no, especially now that we have the fence set up for Cowboy. Two are Oberhaslis, born April 3rd and April 21st. One is a Nubian, born April 2nd. We named the Nubian Banjo, but haven’t yet named the Oberhaslis. The Nubian is very friendly and followed us all around their yard, very much like a dog. The Oberhaslis are more skittish due to nursing longer and less bottle feeding. Hopefully they’ll take to us and be friendly also.
We left this morning around 7:30, hoping that if we left early that the kids would go back to sleep in the car. No such luck, and Delia had been up late the night before, so we were a bit nervous about how the day would go. We arrived at Comotown around 11:45 and then spent about an hour trying to find a place to park. Lesson learned: weekdays are better for popular attractions. The kids had a lot of fun riding the rides there and the lines weren’t even that bad considering how crowded it seemed. Delia was afraid to ride this rotating wing ride, but she finally gave it a try and then wanted to ride it another five times.
We left the park at about 3:45 and arrived at the farm a little after 4:30. They have a beautiful place, with chickens, a lot of goats, and a couple of llamas. Their goats ran right up to us and stuck their heads through the fence to see the kids. Ours were in seclusion so that they’d start to bond together a bit before leaving. We fell in love with Banjo right away. He’s so friendly and sweet. The two Obers are more skittish, but should warm up to us once we begin bottle feeding them.
We just stopped at McDonalds to get Henry more McNuggets and the kids got out of their seats to play with the goats and feed them alfalfa. Henry just squealed and giggled because he turned around and rubbed up against the cage and Banjo nibbled his back. He kept repeating it until Banjo lost interest, and now Henry is saying “Dando, Dando!” trying to get him to do it again.
Our plan is to put them in a horse stall tonight and then figure out what to do with them tomorrow. They’ll eventually be in with Cowboy, but we may want to keep them in a stall or the old chicken run until they get acclimated or even a little bigger. The people we got them from gave us alfalfa and grain for them to eat and a gallon of goat milk to bottle feed them. We also bought three gallons from some people in Embarrass the other night. I hope they’re thirsty! We’re going to try to feed them milk tonight when we get home. Unfortunately it’s supposed to be very cold tonight – around 25.
They’ve been sleeping back there, but now they’re standing up and bleating. The breeders told us they’d probably get hungry around 9:30 and it’s 9:35 right now.
