Randy’s Very Bad Week

There is a cruel rule in the goat world. It says that you always wether any bucks from a first time freshener.

That would be Randy. The sweetest little baby boy goat in the world.

The reason you wether (fix) a buck from a first time freshener is that the mom isn’t proven as a milker yet. She needs to go through this lactation cycle before we have an idea of what type of milker she will be.

Brown Sugar is a first time milker. Although she comes from excellent milk lines, she herself hasn’t been “proven”. In the goat world we don’t want to breed traits that are not in line with the goals of the herd.

We want our goats to be excellent milkers. If a buck comes from a female that is an excellent milker the babies he makes should carry that trait.

Well, as cute and sweet and cuddly Randy is….we had to do it. And we did it last Sunday.

Jo, our friend from MisFit Farms, has a banding tool and does this with her own bucks. We had one on order but it hadn’t come in yet. Plus, we needed some training.

Michael gave Randy some pain medicine and then held him so that we had access to his testicles. I helped Jo fit Randy’s testicles into the rubber band and then release the rubber band. Oh goodness, the screaming he did. I felt so bad. It was really sad.

When we let him down and he started walking he looked like he had been riding a horse for a long time. He laid down a lot and kind of held his leg up. And he made a lot of noise.

Here is his sister, Jessie, comforting him.

So, here is what it looked like once the banding was done.

He was eating in that picture but quickly decided that laying down would be more comfortable.

The blood supply is being cut off which will make the testicles shrink to almost nothing. It should take two to three weeks.

Well, that was the end of the very bad week. On Friday, Michael took Randy into the vet to dis-bud him again. Scurs had started to grow and so we took him into the vet and they burned the scurs off. You can see in the above picture how much of his head has been burned. Some people don’t choose to burn the scurs off but, when he grows up and plays/fights with other bucks they can bleed and even break off.

That isn’t all that happened on Randy’s very bad week. The day before the vet visit we had to give him, Jessie and Halle Berry CD/T vaccinations.

So our poor little, loveable Randy had a very bad week indeed.

In other barn news, Halle Berry still hasn’t had a baby yet. Let me remind you that we don’t know when she got pregnant because she is a very quiet doe when in heat. We locked her up with Jasper for a month in the love shack so we are not sure when the deed was done. Usually we would notice that a doe doesn’t come back into heat. Well, with Halle we have a hard time knowing if she is in heat.

We do believe her to be pregnant because her udder is forming and ….shhhh….. she is rather large.

On the other side of the aisle, in the buck stall, the baby barn swallows have hatched and are hungry.

I love barn swallows and we have a bunch every year. They quickly fly in and out of the barn via doors or windows. There are at least two other nests in the barn.

Back to Randy, four days later he is no worse for the wear. He is acting normal and enjoying life.

Enjoy your day,
Karen