Saying Goodbye to Jenni

I posted a couple weeks ago about our little Jenni not doing so well. She'd been getting progressively worse for a while and we had decided that since her quality of life was so poor that we would choose not to treat her and hopefully let her pass on her own.

  Well, we spent a week making sure she was happy and comfortable, giving her whatever she felt like eating. We expected that any day we would go out and find her gone but Jenni had other plans. She was a tough little goat, and even as weak and sick as she was she wasn't going to go out easy.

   We even thought for a couple days that she was getting better; putting on weight and getting stronger. I even went so far as to give her some antibiotics and B vitamins to see if things could turn around for her.

  Then last weekend she just crashed. She got so weak that she would fall over and couldn't get back up with out help. We finally made the decision that on Monday I would take her to our local large animal vet to the euthanized.
  

  That morning, while I was milking the other girls, Jenni fell down three times and needed help even getting her head and shoulders back upright. The third time, I got her into an upright and comfortable position laying in the hay and told her what was going to happen. Then I headed back up front to pick up the milk, call the vet, and put a large dog kennel in my car to transport the little girl.

  When I went back to get Jenni, she was standing, waiting for me at the gate. She somehow got herself up and made her way to a place in the pasture she hadn't been in weeks, if not months. It may sound silly, but I took it as reassurance that we had made the right decision and that Jenni was ready to go.

  I carried Jenni up front and loaded her into my car. She had lost so much weight, carrying her was unfortunately very easy. While we waited at the vet's office, I sat in the back of the car talking to Jenni and feeding her oatmeal and cabbage leaves, some of her favorite food. My wonderful large animal vet came out and Jenni went very quickly without any distress at all. She was finally able to leave her arthritic, painful body.

  My vet did say that what happened with Jenni is what happens with CAE+ goats at the end. They just start to waste away. Everything falls apart all at once, and they are just not strong enough to fight off things like worms and infections.

I brought Jenni's body back with me to the farm. I thought it was important that the other goats, especially her companion Josie, know that Jenni was gone and not just missing. I laid her in the middle of the goat yard and all the girls gave her a little sniff before heading back out to graze. We had our own little goat wake.

  I managed to pretty much hold it together all day. It wasn't until later that evening that I came around the corner to see Josie just standing with her head hanging down, staring into the goat room where Jenni spent most of her time the last few weeks that my heart broke a little. Josie and Jenni came to our farm together and were virtually inseparable until Jenni got too sick to go out grazing every day. We even wondered if the two girls were related somehow.

  All in all, I really think we made the right decision. If we had known that Jenni wasn't going to go on her own, we would have brought her to the vet sooner. Goats are way tougher that sheep, and little Jenni was a real fighter to the end.

R.I.P. Jenni

Runaway goats

I've been feeling under the weather for the last week or so. I managed to catch a cold that just kicked my butt. Yesterday, I was feeling particularly icky and decided morning chores be damned, I was gonna get a little extra sleep. With one thing and another, I was quite late getting out back to release the poultry and milk the goats.

 I guess the goat ladies got impatient and decided that I was never coming out to give them their breakfast because four of the girls decided to up and run away from home!

I've had to retrieve the ladies from the back pasture for their morning milking before when I was running behind, but this was the first time that they decided to fly the coop so to speak.

See those black and white dots on the other side of the fence? 

Yeah, that's our goats in the neighbor's field. 

Luckily, our goats seem to like me a lot and like getting their morning scoop full of tasty goat chow even more. I started calling their names, and I had a mini caprine stampede on my hands complete with Gertie and Thea pulling off some ridiculous happy goat hops and dances on their way to the front. I'm not sure which is more hilarious, Thea's prancing that looks like a drunken camel falling down a sand dune or Gertie trying to fly thru the air with about two feet of pendulous udder flopping around underneath her. Meanwhile the youngsters, Gwen and Eve, are running behind trying to headbutt everything in sight!

Thea photobomb! 

On a much sadder note, Big Onion and I are pretty sure that little Jenni is not going to be with us much longer. If you will recall, Jenni is our CAE positive girl. Since she came to us she has suffered with almost debilitating arthritis. I tried a number of different supplements and medications to try and help her, but nothing seems to make much of a difference in her quality of life.

Lately she has started rapidly dropping weight. We tried worming her repeatedly with very little success  She's very weak, and her appetite is odd. She only wants to eat certain things. Turns her nose up at goat food and alfalfa, but last night she literally almost choked to death to trying to scarf down cracked corn.

This morning she was going after spilled chicken feed which is really odd for her. Normally she will not go near any feed that has touched the ground. I walked away for a second and came back to find that she had fallen down in a heap with her head under her body. Poor girl.

We are not sure if it is just the CAE finally catching up with her or something else going on, but Big Onion and I have made the hard decision not to take any major steps of intervention in her case. Her quality of life was never good. She was always in pain, and anything we do at this point will only prolong her suffering.

This was a really hard choice for us to make. Working for a vet, it's against my instincts not to try and fix this poor old girl, but I think we have made the right choice. Tomorrow, I will give her some pain meds, let her eat whatever she wants, and hope for the best.

Weaning Gwen

 For a long time now, we have been cutting back the frequency of Gwen's nursing on Thea. From twice a day to once to every other then every third day. Well, she just recently turned four months old, so we figured it was high time the girl was weaned completely.

 As you can see, she barely fits under Thea already. She actually half fell off the stand after this picture was taken.

 She will still get a bowl full of goat chow twice a day when the other goats get milked, and she has access to enough scrubby, bushy pasture to keep any goat happy.

The next big step in her little goaty life will be when she gets to be an adult, and we breed her. Goats don't come into milk until they are bred and give birth. Today Big Onion and I talked about the fact that we will probably have to find a different goaty boyfriend for our little Gwen than for the other girls.

We plan on trying to find a nice Nubian to bred to Thea and Josie so that we can increase the milkfat in the next generation. Unfortunately, it looks like little Gwen is going to stay very little (about the same size as Jenni pictured below). I guess next year we'll be in the market for a handsome Nigerian dwarf buck as well.

Jenni just wishes we'd stop making such of a fuss over the little whipper snapper and give her her breakfast!

Happy Holidays!

 For Christmas, we decided to give the birds a little treat....

 Peas!

 The bunnies got oranges, cauliflower leaves, and carrots. 

Could you just die of cute?!

We also decided to torture/embarrass the goats by making them pose for pictures with my santa hat....

It was slightly too large for Gwendolyn....

 and it totally didn't fit Josie.

 Thea is under there somewhere. 

But Jenni totally made it work for her!

Happy Holidays from the HighTail Farms crew!!

Like Ducks to Water

So this happened today.

After 10 months of living here, the ducks have finally found the creek. This is bad for a couple reasons. For one thing, the creek cuts through our property and is not fenced. If they come ashore in the wrong place, the ducks could easily find themselves in the neighbor's yard or even on the street. It's also bad news because, as you can see, this is no pristine mountain stream we are talking about here. At best, this creek is used as a drainage channel.

  We have been talking about fencing off access to the creek from the first pasture for a while now. The sheep love to run to the edge of it every time they see a herding dog, leaving me with palpitations and visions of my crazy butt diving in that ditchwater to saving a drowning sheep. Our original plan was just to put up a few strands of barbed wire, but it looks like now we will have to use something more poultry-proof.

Josie and Jenni know those ducks are in trouble!

Turkeys are weird too

Some days it seems like the turkeys just pass right out where they stand for a midday nap.  

I've finally learned not to freak out when I turn the corner and see an apparently dead bird. 

They always pop right up when they see me and continue sticking their big ugly beaks in my business. 

Not to be outdone in the weird department, Jenni decided to up the ante with this little number. 

Yeah, she is completely asleep with her back foot behind her head and her own shoulder as a pillow. The best part is she somehow manages to make this craziness look comfortable. 

Weird beasts. 

Further proof: Goats are weird

Turned the corner of the poultry house to see this.....

I'm thinking, "Oh god! Jenni died!! How could this happen?! She seemed ok this morning....a little stiff jointed as usual, but nothing serious..."

I rush over to her prone form laid out in the middle of the pasture in the middle of the day, and she pops right up, "Hi! Is it dinner time?"

Yep, crazy ass goat was just asleep. Stretched out, head backs, and totally zonked. I guess the warm sun feels good on her achey joints.

Not to be left out of the fun, Josie decided to make a bed of this defunct kiddy pool.

Yep. Goats are weird. 

How (not) to milk a sheep

Little Rhubard a.k.a. Ruby has been with us for about a week. It quickly became clear that this youngster was not old enough to live on grass alone as her gut became more swollen every day with undigested food and her back felt more and more bony. At first we tried powered lamb milk replacer, but she was having none of it. We do have a freezer full of goat milk, but there is such a close connection between CAE (which our girls have) and OPP, the sheep version of the virus, that we were reluctant to feed this to the girl. Everything we read assured us that pasteurizing the milk would kill the virus though, so yesterday I cooked up a batch of milk for Ms. Ruby. 

 Worked like a charm. 

We also added a bit of olive oil to the milk just in case her swollen gut was the beginnings of bloat. 

 Ms. Ruby loves her goat milk, but feeding pasteurized goat milk to a baby sheep is less than ideal in my book, so today I set out to try and get some actual sheep's milk from Patch, one of our nursing mommas.

 Step 1: Get the sheep into the goat pen.

I'd love to say that I called in my trusty herding dogs to move the sheep into the pen, but none of us are to that point in training (myself and the sheep included). Thank heavens those sheep will do just about anything for a mouthful of sweet feed...including following me into hostile territory. I swear Jenni in the foreground above is just itching for me to turn my back to she can give those ovine intruders a taste of her horns.  

 Step 2: Catch the sheep and get her into the milking stanchion.

Suffice to say this was easier said than done. At this point, the smart thing for me to do would have been to exhaust the remaining sheep, who kept trying to climb into the feed bucket on the stanchion, Ruby, who kept trying to climb into my lap and suck on my elbow, and the various ducks, geese, turkeys, and guineas who were were just generally making a nuisance of themselves. 

 I was smart enough to exclude Josie from the party. She was less than pleased at this. Not only were the sheep in her space, but there was a sheep on HER stand, eating HER food. Completely unacceptable. After about 10 minutes of staring goat-daggers at my back, she took to banging her head against the gate then rubbing her horns back and forth on it in what I guess was supposed to be a threatening manner.

Meanwhile, I was trying my best to milk poor Patch who was being just as quiet and patient as could be amid the chaos of barnyard mayhem and my fumbling at her nether regions. After cleaning her utter of god know what she's been laying the past month (Yick!!), I did my darndest to get a grip on them tiny teats with zero success. I'm tell you, her nipples were so small, I couldn't even get two fingers around them. I even tried my homemade vacuum sealer milking contraption that works like a charm on the goats. Still no luck. Not a drop. The expression 'blood from a stone' comes to mind.

I finally went back to hand milking which was more like nipple pinching and was able to get one drop of milk at a time. I'm not kidding here. ONE DROP of milk per squeeze. At that rate, it'd take me about 3 years to get enough milk for one meal for Ruby.

 At that point, I decided to forget it and made myself feel useful by de-wooling the rest of Patch's leftover winter fuzz and giving her crusty rear a good cleaning.

 Safely back on the ground and reunited with her daughter, Miss FancyPants, none the worse for my failed efforts. I guess at this point I should give up on dreams of sheep milking and stick to the goats. The only thing I can think that might make it easier is if I pull Patch from Fancy for a day and let her build up some steam in that utter before trying again. Honestly though, I just can't see it working much better. There is just nothing to get a grip on down there.

Plus, how could I possibly hope to succeed with THIS looking over my shoulder. Jeez.

Bad news

After two trips to the vet, many banamine injections, and some bloodwork, we got some very bad news about our little Mini LaMancha goat, Jenni.

Ever since we got her, she has been holding up her front legs, alternating from one foot to the other. She had a lot of trouble getting up and would walk like a Nazi soldier, goose-stepping with straight front legs and head swaying side to side. At first the vet thought it was laminitis, that her feet were hurting, hence the banamine injections. These didn't seem to help much at all. The next step was steroids, but we weren't sure if she was pregnant, so it was back to the vet for an ultrasound and some bloodwork.

In the meantime, I came across some information about a disease called CAE, caprine arthritis encephalitis. It a virus that usually affects very young goats in the form of deadly pneumonia, but can sometimes show up in older goats as progressive, crippling arthritis. The vet said he had never even seen it in an adult, so didn't even think to suggest this as a possibility. He drew blood for a pregnancy test and for CAE.

Well, the pregnancy test came back negative, but the CAE was definitively positive. In a way, the negative pregnancy test was good news because goats with CAE can pass it on to their young thru their milk. We would have had to separate mother and baby at the moment of birth and bottle raise the kid.

So, we are drying Jenni up so that she doesn't have the extra stress on her body of producing milk all the time. We are trying out some different combinations of joint supplements to see if we can find something to help her get around a little better. We also secured a much bigger area for the girls to live in so that she can get more exercise and eventually be allowed to graze the pasture with the sheep.

Of course now we are worried that our other goat, Josie, is also carrying this disease. Today, I drew blood from her to send out for the same two tests.

As a side note, Josie was less than pleased with my attempts to steal her blood. She actually got her head turned around in the milk stand and bit me in the face! Thank goodness goats don't have top teeth so my face was unharmed. Must have been a warning shot.