Separating Ed

Apparently boy nigerian dwarf goats can be fertile as early as 7 weeks of age. But they also can nurse until 6 months. Which makes for a dilemma. You don't want a goat like Ed to impregnate his mother or sister, so you need to build him a separate pen. But in order to do that, you need to wean him. So we put in a fence to spearate our pasture into two pens, one for Ed and Breezy and Dublin (who are not related to Ed) and one for Cle, Frosty, and Gigi.

Fast forward to a couple of weekends ago when we put everyone into their new pens (complete with an elaborate stepstool system for us to get from one pen to the other since we didn't have time to put in a gate). Lots of bleating, lots of complaining, as expected. But when we went to milk Frosty the next morning, expecting our typical few squirts, there was a ton of milk. Which meant several things:

1. It's not that we are ineffective milkers, as we had thought we might be, it's more that the kids had drinking most of it (duh... but since we hadn't seen them nursing much lately we had figured they were almost self-weaned).

2. Gigi doesn't seem to keep up with Frosty's milk supply on her own.

3. Keeping Ed separate from Frosty and Gigi means committing to milking like normal people, twice a day, morning and evening.

4. The other option would be to dry Frosty out, but that would involve also separating her from Gigi, adding separation anxiety to separation anxiety (plus a quick new need to build a third fenced pen).

5. We're leaving for 2 1/2 weeks, and while our neighbors and my kind brother have both been generous enough to take on goat-sitting duties, milking twice a day is a bit too much to add to that, especially since Frosty still spends half the time trying to step in the milk bucket.

So we decided to reunite all the goats. We decided that since Gigi hasn't started going into heat yet (and Frosty her mama hadn't started cycling until 6 or 7 months), Gigi won't be fertile even if Ed maybe possibly is. And we decided that Frosty wouldn't let Ed try anything on her anyway, since she is still responsible for feeding him. Anthropomorphizing? Maybe. But meanwhile we're crossing our fingers and considering this the best, more reasonable option for people who are perhaps foolishly attempting both farm animals and travel in the same lifetime. We'll separate them again, this time for real, come January.

Meanwhile, a couple of pictures from Mike's birthday/chanukah/beer brewing party, which included an excellent kid-driven living room dance party and an after-party for those who arrived, sans kids, after the first shift called it a night.





Will let you know next post how the animals survived our absence, whether or not today's snowstorm passed soon enough to let us get to seattle for our flights, and the word on the street from peru and paraguay. Best wishes for multiple kinds of holiday-y winter-y good stuff, and talk to you next year.