Naming the kids and protective mother goat
The problem with taking three posts to tell you about Friday is that I now have three days worth of goat excitement to share with you in one post. Let's see if I can be succinct....
Reader question 1: Do the kids look like you thought they would?
The buckling (left) looks almost identical to his father and just like I
expected. He does have a tiny bit of white frosting on his ears and
maybe a couple of moon spots --- it's hard to tell because he's already
so pale. The doeling (top) is a bit paler and has a hint of a dark line
down the middle of her back.
Reader questions 2 and 3: What are you going to name them? Are you going to eat the buckling?
The girl got the name Aurora when she was in the womb and it stuck. The
boy might be dinner...or the farmer who sells us our straw might want
the buckling to replace his current herd sire. Until we know for sure
about the little boy's future, we're keeping him nameless.
Now moving on to my own observations....
Artemesia
is the world's most protective goat mother, and she actually takes it
almost too far. Even though Lucy is extremely sweet, Artie is afraid to
let the kids get close to our canine companion. Instead, she stashes the
twins in a hidden spot like the one shown here (or, previously, on the milking stand)
before she goes out to graze. I'm slowly working on making Artemesia
feel more able to bring the little ones with her so she'll eat more
non-hay.
In
the meantime, I'm stuck bringing the fresh portion of dinner to her. To
that end, I'm spoiling Artemesia with her very favorite types of tree
branches, which I attach to the side of an IBC tank for easy leaf
picking, and with armloads of freshly cut rye stems. On that diet, she
seems to be bouncing back from her pregnancy very fast.
Now for a pop quiz ---
can you tell who's in the picture on the left? And which is the doeling
in the photo at the top of this post?
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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.
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Do goats show much tendency for freemartins if there are male and female?
In cows it's almost close to 100%.
The kid at the left photo is Aurora ; and Aurora is the one on the right on the photo of the top post???
Nita --- I hadn't actually heard of freemartins, so I went and looked them up. The internet seems to suggest that they're unlikely to occur in goats --- thank goodness! Since twins are the most likely result with goats, and since 50% of twins would be male/female pairings, that's a good thing. Otherwise, there would be an awful lot of sterile female goats out there! I'm guessing twins must be a lot less common in cows.
Jayne --- You know, after typing that, I started second-guessing my own IDs in the photo. I'd originally thought the one in the last photo was Aurora, but now I'm thinking it's the boy (and that the photo is just a bit washed out). You're definitely right about the top picture! :-
Gerry --- If you count all the ones on my hard drive, it might be closer to a thousand.
Chris --- I think you're right --- there's something about the boy's face that's pretty distinctive.