Primates - Go Figure!

Well, the farmer’s precious pet Winnie got very sick. She had milk fever and went down like a stone. She couldn’t walk, because she couldn’t stand up, and the farmer sat around petting her and giving her calcium and Vitamin B and swaddling her in blankets and fetching salal and huckleberry and fresh grass and leaves and all kinds of tempting treats.


I did not get my feet trimmed as had been promised, and Lucy did not get her haircut fixed. Tangy did not do any walking practice – Tangy walks like a swordfish reeled to the surface on a sportfishing tv show, hurling her whole body against the collar and flapping around in mid-air - and the compost pile did not get turned. Domino didn’t get castrated, either, but he didn’t mind.


All because Princess Winnie was sick.


Sometimes I do not understand the workings of the primate mind, because personally I think Winnie is a pain. To me, I say, c’est la vie, if a goat has milk fever and won’t get up to eat, then it doesn’t have much gumption which probably signals weak genes.


I have had milk fever but that is because I had triplets who were very hungry because of their exceptional genetic makeup. Whereas with Winnie, her triplets are perfectly ordinary, and one of them was even a runt, so again we get back to the weak genes, and honestly I don’t understand all the extra effort that could have been better used fixing Lucy’s haircut (looks like it was done with a lawnmower) or castrating Domino the-soon-to-be-wether who really has become a pest with his goatboy ideas.


But this is just one example of how the primate mind works.


Primates can be useful, they have those fingers for picking bugs off you and scratching that part near your withers where you can’t reach, but do not try to figure out what they are thinking. Even if you could do it, you would probably not want to know.


Winnie got better but obviously through no fault of her own weak genes.

Two More

There are two more of them now. LaMancha bottle baby monsters. Jessie's kids.

They don't have names either, Z is a very hard year, and they all look exactly alike except Pinky and that other one, Joemma, who is part Toggenburg even though she has no ears. The rest of them run around in a black blur, some are black and tan, some are black and cream, some are black and brown. They are all boring.

"Aren't they cute?" says the farmer, carrying them around.

Not really, I think. But what can you say.

To be polite, I try to pretend I am charmed by their puckish antics. Goodness! They're adorable! With their earless heads and their little monkey faces! Look at them knocking all the buckets over and dancing across the clean hay with their muddy footprints! What could be cuter!

Who has time to list all the cuter things than an earless-monkey-looking baby goat? Let's just start with a Nigerian Dwarf baby goat, maybe? By like 10,000 percent or so?

That brings us back to Hannah Belle Lecter, my daughter, who has been steadily achieving a more and more blimp-like condition. Each week Lori says, "she must be getting close," but since every year Hannah Belle is bred approximately 17 times (she enjoys breeding, what can I say, it's a free country) we never know exactly when she might kid.

But even I would say, as I see her lumbering across the pasture blotting out the sun with her bulk (not today, today it's raining), even I would say, "she must be getting close."

Mustn't she?

Earth Day

It was Earth Day this week which gave us a good excuse to celebrate the force that through the green fuse drives the flower. Go flowers! But excuse me isn't every day Earth Day? Or is there a backup planet we will all be moving to?

If that's the case I hope there won't be so many bottle babies on it.

Especially of the LaMancha doeling persuasion, enough already with the earless terrors. This new one Pinky who is being called Zut Alors (she does look kind of French and believe me that's no compliment) while her real name is decided is perhaps the holiest of the terrors I have had to endure.

She was already pampered to death before she cracked her head open and after that she was practically carried everywhere on a satin cushion. Make a note of these two easy steps if you would like to create your own bottle baby monster.

Now she runs everywhere screaming. She pushes the other bottle babies off the slide. She fastens her jaws to the farmer's hand - or any hand that happens to be carrying a bucket of milk - like a lamprey eel. She t-bones anyone who tries to sit on the farmer's lap.

And then I get reprimanded for gently helping her find her way out of my stall.

"Don't hurt little Pinky now," says the farmer. "She's still recovering."

Oh please. Please.

Beautiful Day

It is important to keep track of the most beautiful days of the year, so you can remember them later. Yesterday was one of the top ten most beautiful days of the year. It was like old times - the farmer left all the pesky bottle babies and came and sat on the tank cover with me in the sun and scratched all over my back while I head-butted attention seekers away as necessary. It was a beautiful day, and today will be too.

Today will be a good day for a birthday, and somebody is going to have one: Jessie the so-called beauty queen Lamancha yearling is headed to the kidding stall right now.

It's a beautiful day. Don't let it get away.

It Does A Body Good

Little Baby Z looked very bad yesterday morning. She had three shots of medicine: one for tetanus prevention, one to stop other kinds of infection, and one of vitamin B. She was shivering and lethargic and didn’t notice when the farmer moved her inside to the baby nursery.

She didn’t make even a peep, much less offer the kind of Grand Prix tantrum* she and her mother have down to an art form. Instead she just lay and shivered, eyes foggy and blank.

The farmer put a sweater on her. She kept shivering. The farmer put another sweater on top of the first sweater. She looked stylish – pink and white crocheted jacket over a black terrycloth undervest - but quite miserable.

The baby nursery is a little pen on the kitchen floor of the cottage. The pen is about four feet square and about two feet high and bedded with nice fluffy straw. It sits a few feet away from the woodstove so it can be made quite cozy.

The farmer put Baby Z in the baby nursery and left to do chores, checking back perdiodically. On the fourth check, late in the afternoon, the farmer coaxed her into drinking a large bottle of warm milk.

She seemed to wake up a little, and looked around in surprise, wearing the expression of the amnesia patient on a bad tv show – where am I? - before settling back to sleep.

On the fifth bed check, Baby Z was not in the baby pen. She had jumped over the fence and gone to look for her friends, leaving a trail of baby goat pee throughout the cottage and knocking over a stack of magazines used to start fires in the woodstove, then eating – or perhaps just chewing and spitting out - part of a New Yorker** cover.

She was dancing on the coffee table in the living room when finally apprehended.

And that’s why it is so important to drink your milk.

* When they add tantrums to the Olympics, bet on these two for Gold and Silver.

** (Editor’s note: do not use New Yorkers to start fires. It is not the right kind of paper. We know that. We ran out of newspaper inserts.)

Cross Your Fingers

The little doeling Pinky had a freak accident yesterday and we are very worried about her. She got a bad gash and lost a lot of blood. The farmer was wondering how much blood a little baby goat could have but didn't want to look it up because sometimes it is better not to know too much. On the other hand Pinky is very feisty and when the farmer tried to take her inside for observation and intensive care she pitched such a tantrum at being separated from her friends that it just wasn't worth it.

Anyway please keep your fingers crossed for little Pinky-Zena-Zinnia-Zedoary-Zinfandel-etc.

The Famous Jammies

Baby picture of the famous Jammies. She never really got much bigger.

Enough Already About the PJs

Jammies Jammies Jammies.

This is all I hear all day long.

Isn’t Jammies adorable. Look how tiny she is. Look at her cute little udder. Look how she loves the milkstand. Look how she gives the farmer kisses. Jammies Jammies Jammies. Look how she is growing a beard. (A sad little beard to go with her sad little eyes.) Jammies’ milk is so sweet and creamy, it is just like candy. Yada Yada Yada.

I am good and sick of it.

The other day one of the farmer’s friends came over and the farmer launched into the same tiresome Jammies Jammies Jammies monologue.

“Oh,” said the farmer’s friend. “I’d love to try her milk. Can I have some?”

The farmer turned all beady-eyed and started hemming and stammering and offering up crocodile regrets.

“Oh, I am so sorry, if only I hadn’t just used it. How too bad. If I’d known you would want some,” etc etc etc. The kind of excuse that is way too complicated. The farmer’s friend made a skeptical face.

“Maybe next time,” he said grimly.

“Maybe,” agreed the farmer, brightly. Translation: NEVER.

We all know there is plenty of Jammies milk hoarded up in the farm kitchen since the farmer has a terrible fear of running out of the world’s most perfect latte milk.

It was a sad display. Very sad.

g.o.t.d.

We have not had Goat of the Day in a long time. Our goat of the day is Bertie. Bertie is Boo’s daughter, so she is half Nubian. That’s unfortunate but it can’t be helped.

Her real name is Sister Bertrille, but we call her Bertie, or Big Bird. She is big, and with her tiny winged ears she looks like a prehistoric flightless bird, a Nubian Dodo or some such thing. (Nubodo? Dodubian?)

The other half is LaMancha. She got the good half of each: she is gentle and kind like a sweet Nubian (her grandmother Marty, for example), but she shows up for work like a LaMancha. She can be put in a stall with the tiniest milker – Jammies the sad-eyed mini-Mancha is her roommate right now – and no harm will come to the teeny one. On the other hand, when you are ready to milk, so is she.

Last week Bertie performed a textbook delivery of a pair of pretty twin does. She did it without any fuss, drama, delays, or hijinks. Right now she is milking nicely and not screaming or kicking the bucket or running in circles aroound the milkstand, unlike certain dry yearlings who shall remain nameless.

So she is our Goat of the Day.

Congratulations to Bertie.

The Young and the Nameless

It has happened again. We should have known it would happen. It happened to her mother. And to her mother’s mother. And now it has happened to her.

First was her grandmother who went through reams of names which wouldn’t stick. The only thing that would stick was “Big Orange,” since she was quite large and bright orange.

This is a naming problem that runs in the farmer’s family, the tendency to just call an animal by its color. The farmer’s family, growing up, would always – just for example - have a black cat. The cat would have a clever official name, like Midnight or Satan.

The farmer’s father would come home from work and see the cat and say, “oh, hello, Blackie.” Or, “where is Blackie?” And all the cats gradually became Blackie.

Anyway finally Big Orange received a name through the kindness of blog commenters. It was an X Year so it was particularly difficult to think of anything, but in the end a brilliant name was devised for her even though we must admit that to this day around the barn everyone calls her Big Orange.

Eventually she had a daughter who was also orange, but a much paler orange, and not quite as large as B.O. This daughter was called Tangerine, or Tangy for short, but that couldn’t be allowed to stick because it was a Y Year. So eventually another excellent name came from the blog, even though – you guessed it – everyone here still calls her Tangy.

Well, owing to some new slats on the buck gate which apparently allow for conjugal visiting through the eye of the needle, Tangy is now a teenage mother. Her week-old daughter, who is the palest orange yet – shading actually into pinkish-yellowish – has already been through several names.

It is a Z Year, and her failed monikers include: Zinnia, Zinbad, ZZ-Top, Agent Zero, Zinfandel, and Zsa Zsa. She is now being called – you guessed it - Pinky.

She needs a real name. A Z Name. One that will stick to her.

Little Goat, Big World

...continued


Well Winnie as you know is a member of the Soprano Family of Lamanchas. Like Ronny, she is a Brandy daughter, and all the Brandy daughters are professional goats.

This means that they are not amateurs. They do everything according to the Guidelines and Bylaws of the Professional Dairy Goat Association. That includes kidding.

So after giving the traditional foghorn bellow signaling the start of kidding, Winnie went through the PDGA kidding checklist, which goes like this:

1. Site prep: not to exceed 20 minutes. (Includes circling, arranging straw, nesting, pawing, examining water bucket, hollering for an attendant.)

2. Preliminary test pushing: not to exceed 20 minutes. (Includes getting up and down, open-mouth breathing, warm-up pushing from comfortable sternally recumbent position, hollering for an attendant as necessary).

3. Moderate pushing: not to exceed 20 minutes. (Includes stretching exercises, pawing as necessary, looking behind you to make sure you didn’t accidentally kid already, pushing from lying-flat-on-your-side position, muffled or silent screams optional).

4. Serious pushing: not to exceed 10 minutes, recumbent or standing position as suits the mission. Push with all your muscles and scream if you feel like it. Once the head is through, give the trademark “Soprano” wiggle to squirt the first kid all the way out.

5. Break for grain, cookies, and warm water: not to exceed 10 minutes. Relax a little, then repeat steps 4 and 5 for each subsequent kid.

All the steps were completed on schedule, producing two strapping buck kids. The farmer bounced Winnie and did not feel any more kids.

“Is that all?” said Lori, when the second buckling came inside to the baby nursery.

“Yes I think so,” said the farmer.

“Oh really,” said Lori, and went out to the barn while the farmer started the two bucklings. In a few minutes (not exceeding ten) Lori came back in with a tiny bundle and began barking orders. “This one needs help,” she said. She had a teeny-tiny hamster-size baby who wasn’t breathing.

The farmer took it and started slapping it and gave a few puffs in its teeny-tiny mouth.

“Where is the syringe? Get the syringe!” barked Lori, who had gone into ER mode.

I wonder who she is talking to, wondered the farmer, continuing with baby goat CPR. Lori found the syringe herself and started suctioning fluids out of the baby’s mouth. Eventually the teeny-tiny hamster-size baby started sneezing and coughing.

A few minutes later the farmer flipped the baby over, sure this one must be a doeling.

No indeed. Triplet bucks. For the first couple of days the tiny baby was called PeeWee and Squirt and “the little guy” and Hamster and Gerbil.

Then Wendy Webster came over one day and she said his name was Stuart, Stuart Little, and it turned out that really was his name. His head shoots up every morning when he hears it. He is still tiny but each day he tries to double in size by drinking more milk than you would ever possibly imagine such a small body could hold.

He may be small, but he is a Soprano.

The Accidental Tourists

The first part of this story is really boring so I am going to skip to the middle. This means you will have to fill in Chapter One on your own.

…Just then, the screaming started.

“Goodbye now, Greg,” the farmer said to Greg, who was in the middle of a story about the price of alfalfa, usually a riveting topic. The farmer hung up the phone.

In the barn using keen powers of observation the farmer noticed something amiss. One of the dry yearlings had a pair of tiny feet sticking out of her rear end. She was screaming bloody murder, for obvious reasons. You would too.

(timeout for a goat glossary entry) dry yearling: an unbred doe kid from the previous year.

“My goodness,” said the farmer, and ushered the yearling to the kidding stall. Not a moment too soon. The kidding stall had been prepared for Winnie (bago) who was overdue to kid and looking like the GoodYear Blimp but, much like the US Postal Service in these parts, making no attempt to deliver her packages.

Out popped a gigantic and very beautiful doe kid.

“My goodness,” said the farmer, inspecting her for any family traits which might give a clue as to her parentage on the sire’s side. None were readily apparent.

“This one will have to be DNA’d,” said the farmer mournfully. DNA services are useful but not free. The accidental doe kid was so pretty that the farmer put the pink sweater on her. When it comes to baby goats, this is like the yellow jersey of the Tour de France. Some years no one even gets to wear it.


The farmer got everyone settled for the night and put another “dry” yearling in the stall for company. The second “dry” yearling was friends with the first and they often did things together. Luckily they do not have a Facebook page because I shudder to think what would be on it.

Anyway, the second “dry” yearling was known to be bred but it was not known how this happened. The farmer wondered if possibly the dry yearling had been bred and it not marked on the chart, although this had never happened before. In any case based on appearances she had been penciled due at the end of April.

The farmer went to bed, neglecting to remember that the two dry yearlings often did things together.

In the morning there was a faint, discouraged mewing coming from the dry yearling stall.

“My goodness,” said the farmer, peering in. It appeared that the second dry yearling had just kidded. But there was no kid in the stall.

The farmer grabbed the kidding box and some rubber gloves and some towels and examined the dry yearling thoroughly, bouncing her. There did not appear to be any kids inside her.

“My goodness,” said the farmer, or perhaps more colorful language to that effect.

Again there came a distant discouraged mewing, and not from either of the dry yearlings.

The farmer looked down. There was a kickboard along one wall of the stall to prevent the goats from standing on the stall framing and pushing the plywood out. Inside this board was a three and a half inch gap. Inside this gap was a very hungry and still damp buckling, who was very good at crawling forward but who had no reverse gear.

“This one will not have to be DNA’d,” said the farmer happily, since he would be a wether and wouldn’t need any papers.

The farmer settled the new new baby in with old new baby and returned to the barn, where Winnie (bago) gave the traditional foghorn bellow signaling that she was ready to kid.

…to be continued.

Newsletter

I guess we are going to have a newsletter now although I'm not sure the point of having a blog and a newsletter. At some point isn't it just too much information? Or is there any such thing?

Anyway, if you want to get the newsletter it will be a pdf or something like that and will have info on baby goats, farm news, cheese news, and so on. Right now we are waiting for Winnie the hippopotamus to download her kids. It looks like she has a baseball team in there.

If you want the newsletter just click here.

No Thanks, BUB

After several days on the B.U.B. program, Jammies the sad-eyed mini-mancha decided that Ziggy didn’t really look so bad. She has four legs, after all, and fur. Unfortunately Ziggy has gotten accustomed to the bottle, and can’t quite figure out how a real nipple works. “It’s too lifelike!” she screams, when the farmer tries to latch her on. “It’s warm! It doesn’t taste like rubber!”

She is working on it, though, and there is one ironclad rule of baby goats that always prevails in the end: the hungrier they are, the smarter they get. In the meantime, Ziggy follows Jammies everywhere, pestering her when she wants to sleep, chewing her beard, walking in her food, jumping on her whenever she lies down.

B.U.B.

The weather people said we might expect a holly jolly smattering of snow this morning but it wouldn’t amount to much and it wouldn’t stick to the roads. By six o’clock it had smattered up to my pasterns and by nine it was halfway to my knees. I thought smattering meant something else, as in “here is your pitiful meager smattering of daily grain, Baby Belle, hardly enough to keep a hamster alive.”

Anyway they say we should expect a smattering of wind this afternoon so the farmer is going to see if the generator will start. It usually only likes to start on beautiful calm sunny days, though. You would not believe how well it runs on a beautiful calm sunny day. Like a sewing machine.

Jammies is doing better today but when the farmer tried to trick her into taking Ziggy, a little LaMancha doeling, as her baby, she wouldn’t even consider it. Instead she head-butted Ziggy – pretty nicely, considering – all the way down the barn aisle.

She prefers the B.U.B. program (Big Ugly Baby), meaning that she only wants the farmer as her baby. Too bad, Ziggy is much cuter.

Jammies

Some people think when you have a blog you should only write good news because there is always enough bad news to go around. But life isn’t really like that, especially on a farm.

So I just write what happens.

Anyway, after an ominous low tide yesterday afternoon, last night the barometer dropped like a stone, with a big rainstorm blowing into our area. The wind caught in the trees, and the crows cawed angrily all night as their branches shook.

Little Jammies the sad-eyed mini-mancha went into labor. At 4:30 this morning she gave birth to a stillborn buckling.

Unfortunately when the kids are stillborn they cannot help their mother, because they can’t fight to get out into the world. So Jammies did all the fighting, and it was a long hard night for her.

She is very tired. She has a funny look on her face, like a person lost in a train station in a foreign country, a person who needs to get home right away.

Now and then she gets up, murmuring, and paces the stall. She paws through the straw, looking for her baby. She knows he isn’t there.

When the farmer comes she stands quietly to be milked.

Belated Report from the Birthday Party

Ok here is what happened one week ago today during the baby blizzard.

Around 7 in the morning Peaches begins moaning and groaning and laying down. In between practice pushes she gets up and gazes into the distance or eats the new fresh straw in her stall. Wronny has her breakfast as usual. Lucy nibbles at some hay.

Around 11 Peaches gets more serious. She starts making nests in the straw and babbletalking to her babies. Meanwhile, Lucy gets all glassy-eyed and lays down and then gives a nervous yelp like when you step on the dog’s foot. Wronny has a couple of cookies and scratches her head against the rough part of the stall door.

At noon Peaches accelerates her moaning, groaning, standing, pawing, lying. The farmer goes in and tries to check if there is anything on the way out but Peaches insists on cleaning the farmer and turns the wrong end around every time the farmer tries to check the birth canal. After a few minutes the farmer gives up.

Wronny chews her cud and appears to be thinking about the economic stimulus package. She is skeptical, naturally, but willing to give it a chance. Lucy starts getting up and down. Peaches stops all labor and takes a nap.

At 12:15 Wronny makes a nest, lies down, pushes expertly a couple of times, and shoots out a matched set of perfect little black triplets.

At 12:30 the farmer calls the nice neighbor who knows everything about goats and asks if the neighbor would mind holding Peaches’ head so that a proper examination can be performed. The neighbor kindly agrees.

At 1:30 with the assistance of the neighbor the farmer pokes around Peaches’ ladyparts and discovers that there is nothing on the way out. The neighbor reassures the farmer that Peaches looks fine and is just being a slowpoke. The farmer milks a few squirts of milk out to speed things up.

At 3:30 Lucy starts to push quite seriously, her legs stretched out.

At 3:31 Peaches starts to push quite seriously.

At 3:45 a bubble finally emerges from Peaches. The farmer pops it and feels a foot. Lucy gives a bloodcurdling scream. The farmer hustles over and Lucy has got two tiny feet poking out. The farmer reaches in and sure enough there is a nose coming right behind. Lucy gives another bloodcurdling scream. Peaches gives a bloodcurdling scream. The farmer hustles over and now can feel a nose and a foot but the second leg is back.

“Uh oh,” says the farmer and fishes around to try to get the other foot but can’t get around the big head. Lucy gives a bloodcurdling scream.

“I’ll be right back, Peaches,” says the farmer, and hustles over to help pull out Lucy’s first baby, a strapping buckling. Lucy lays stretched out, completely spent and flat as a pancake, but gobbles a cookie when the farmer puts it in her mouth.

The farmer hustles over to Peaches’ stall where a fat little white and black buckling is enjoying some warm milk. “Excellent,” says the farmer.

Lucy gives a bloodcurdling scream and when the farmer gets back to her stall a second kid, this one a little doeling, is laying in the straw. Oddly, Lucy is still lying flat as a pancake with her legs like boards. In fact, she looks paralyzed. “That’s odd,” says the farmer. When the farmer stuffs another cookie in her mouth, she gobbles it without moving anything but her mouth.

Peaches gives a not that bloodcurdling scream, more of a half-hearted bellow. A second little black and white buckling, this one not quite as fat, is enjoying some warm milk. The farmer hustles back to Lucy’s stall, where she is still lying flat, stiff, and completely motionless. The farmer is not in the mood.

“Snap out of it, Lucy,” says the farmer. Lucy shakes her head like a boxer who has had his bell rung. She sits up.

“Thank you,” says the farmer.

The End.

Update

Ok, Atty performed his annual inspection of babies on their first day outside yesterday. We are still way behind but catching up a little. There are seven. Lucy had twins, Wronny had triplets, and Peaches had two exceedingly fat but extremely cute minimanches - one black and one white - with perfect ears. Lucy's adorable little daughter is at the bottom.

Good News - He Got His Old Job Back!

Keeping both ends clean...

The Kids

Well the photographer did not get here yet so I will just tell you that the new kids (all 7) are very cute. Hope that helps.