Working Dog Diary is a series of essays which reflect on the stockdog journey of Kay Spencer, the owner of Working Aussie Source.
Previous chapters are located at the bottom of this page:
2005-2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2012
I don't have much room here for livestock, so I limit myself to the species I enjoy the most. Apparently these are not sheep or ducks, because I've tried both a couple times and I just don't warm to them. What it comes down to is, they are both too fearful and stupid for me to ever truly love. So I keep goats and chickens.
I've kept chickens for twenty years or so. Once you get the hang of them, they are as simple as can be: open up the coop in the morning, close it up at night. In between they free range and lay eggs, hopefully where you can find them. They are friendly, sensible, prudent birds. If you lose some, as does sometimes happen around here, to a hawk or bobcat, buy a few more, they are cheap.
But goats. That's been a struggle. My first goats, five years back, were Boer crosses I acquired for brush clearing and herding training. Gradually I got interested in milk and cheese, and eventually, I decided to invest in registered Kinder goats, a dual-purpose small but not miniature breed, with the goal of keeping three or four milking does so I could try my hand at making hard aged cheeses.
Year before last, I owned two dairy-type goats who were supposed to be my milkers. One could never be gotten in kid, the other turned out to be very poor quality. That was a year of little to no milk. After I got rid of them I turned to the Kinder goat idea and last fall after a good bit of sleuthing (Kinders aren't a common breed), acquired four nice registered does, including two doelings, a bred matron, and a bred yearling. All was peaceful if milkless, until January, when the two bred does kidded.
I had added my pregnancy days wrong, a usual occurrence, as anything involving even the simplest numeric calculation is a big challenge for me. So my young first-freshener, Ivy, kidded without me. By the time I found her in the morning, she had given birth to her triplets. One was on her feet and doing well. One was chilled and weak but alive. The third had never been cleaned and was perfectly dead. Only one teat on Ivy appeared functional. I had not laid in any emergency kid formula, and had nothing to bottle feed the weak doeling with. She died on day two. She was obviously the better quality of the two doelings, to make things even worse. I had the vet out to look at Ivy's udder and he confirmed she had a congenital defect. She would never be a milk goat.
This was not how I had pictured things going. The combination of my criminal stupidity and negligence and bad luck was very hard to get over, emotionally. But I had to, because two weeks later my other doe kidded, with a whole new set of problems.
Minerva is a solid, stolid, experienced doe, very unlike lovely sweet Ivy. She had a startling five kids, and although this time I knew when they were imminent, they were all born in the time it took me to go in the house and cook and eat lunch. She had most of them cleaned too. Four does and a buck. Even the most generously endowed goat only has two teats, however, and I tried my best to get them all colostrum and some supplemental feeding. I had bought some goat milk replacer powder since Ivy's disaster, but the kids all hated it. On the third day one of the doelings collapsed, and despite all my efforts died that night.
After that, things settled down for a few weeks. I kept trying to supplement the smallest kid, whom I named Saffron, but she was not receptive. She seemed to do okay anyway. Minerva has a lot of capacity. Of course I wasn't getting any milk from her either.
When Minerva's kids were a month old, I started penning them separately at night and milking Minerva a bit in the morning, just so I'd have some of my own milk. She absolutely fought being milked and I had to hobble her. Her teats are so low to the ground that I had to milk her into a commandeered dog dish. Meanwhile around the corner the kids screamed at the top of their lungs. It was not a soothing experience for anyone, but at least I was finally, after two years, getting a bit of milk.
After a couple of weeks, the kids weren't screaming as much, Minerva was somewhat less agitated and resistant, and she was giving almost a half gallon in that one milking a day. Although Ivy's doe kid was turning out coarse and stubby, three of the four surviving Minerva kids were extremely nice and I was very happy with them. I was worried about little Saffron though, she had started walking around hunched over with her tail down, as if she had stomach cramps. Her siblings were gaining well, but she wasn't.
That was the situation before the mountain lion attack.
Ever since the scare we'd had three years ago, I'd been locking the goats up at night in roofed pens with wire fencing walls. Unlike coyotes or dogs, lions won't break in or dig under barriers they can't climb or jump. It had worked without incident. But one night last week, I must have forgotten to chain the gate shut.
At four a.m., we awoke to the sound of a kid yelling for help in the field, clearly being carried off. My husband and I and the two Aussies poured out of the house into the pitch darkness. Bedlam: my husband ran uphill through the high gate into the field, I ran downhill through the barn. When I opened the barn door goats slammed past me into the driveway, and the dogs tried to gather them up. My husband caught two and the dogs chased two back into the barn. The kids, except Saffron, who slept with her mom, were all locked in a separate pen, all accounted for. The four adults were back in the barn. Saffron was missing, she must have been the one nabbed by whatever it was. Then I saw Minerva's face. One half was covered with blood. It looked like her eye was gone.
Eventually we went back in the house. There was nothing to be done until daylight except cry. Minerva would not let me clean her face. Saffron was gone.
In the morning, when I went out to let out and feed the hens, Bonnie and Ty much to my amazement spooked up Saffron, who had apparently spent a chilly night nestled under the feed bins. It took a bit to catch her. I had Bonnie, the gentle, work her slowly down the hill until I could bring some goats out where she could see them and follow them back to the barn. That worked. She had bite wounds on her sides but they were shallow. We found the place where the lion had gone over the fence after dropping her — the field fencing was bent and the post was leaning. There were a few paw prints in the mud.
The vet arrived soon after, and sedated and cleaned up and stitched Minerva. The lion had bitten the side of her head, penetrating the bone of her skull behind her horn scur and again below her eye. The eye itself appeared basically undamaged. Her horn scur had to be sawn off, leaving a round hole in her head, and a drain tube put in below her eye. She looked like the Bride of Frankenstein had collided with a train. But she was alive, and barring infection might stay that way.
My kitchen became a nursing station; pain meds and antibiotics and probiotics, kid bottles, hypodermic needles and drenching syringes in variety. The vet put Saffron on a coccidiostat in case that was the issue she'd had before. All the milk I'd been saving from Minerva started getting put into Saffron, who now adored her three times a day bottle. Minerva was in such terrible pain despite the Banamine injections that she stopped eating entirely for a few days and I watched her udder shrink. I fed the kids grain three times a day; they were six weeks old and could be weaned if they had to be. I cleaned the pens religiously, cut browse in the forest daily to coax Minerva to eat. I occasionally fell asleep in the straw in the goat pens with a kid dozing in my lap. And it began to rain.
We had suffered a bad drought over the winter. We were at a third of normal precipitation and this is the last month of the rainy season. It started raining and hasn't stopped for five days. Maybe this is the end of bad fortune for awhile, the rain said to me. Maybe it will get better now.
Yesterday Saffron's tail was up for the first time in two weeks, though she's still limping where the fangs went into her shoulder. Minerva's hideous swelling is subsiding. Her drain tube comes out today, and she gets her last shot of oxytetracycline. She is eating now, and she seems to be bagging up some again.
And I am sitting by the wood stove drinking tea while the dogs snore on the furniture. The house is enclosed by the rain, comforting as a library. We've survived and learned. That's all there is, in the end, I guess. Some time in the future I'll make my cheese. Won't be this year.