Disclaimer this isn’t about sunshine or rainbows, although we’ve enjoyed both this week at the farm, as well as snow and rain. Today I’ll be talking about how farming isn’t always sunshine and rainbows. One of my mentors at Beaver Creek ski patrol was fond of saying “It’s all Mickey Mouse ’till someone ain’t breathing,” and although everyone’s breathing at the farm, sometimes caring for livestock is not as pleasant as paintings or pictures of farms portray.
We strive to keep our animals happy, healthy, and ensure they are safe. Goats’ natural tendencies can make that challenging, and keeping them safe can lead to discomfort, for us. We had scheduled to castrate (we actually band) and disbud (dehorn) our goat kids today. We band them to prevent unintended breeding, and disbudding them is for the goats safety, as well as our own. The banding is simple and from observation less traumatizing than castration, basically we put a very tight rubber band on the scrotum and after a week or two it falls off, no knifes, no blood, no fuss. Disbudding is a tad more invasive and entails searing the bud, (a horn to be) off. Ironically as we approached the goat barn we noticed that Buttercup, one of our momma goats, had broken one of her horns. Whether it got caught in the fence, or she was butting another goat we’re not sure but now we’ll need to watch for infection and hope she’s okay. I’ve had many friends who had sheep and goats hang themselves in fences on their horns. It’s for these reasons we disbud, as the 10 seconds it takes to disbud them seems far better than the agony an animal caught in a fence would suffer. Also after seeing them all sleeping in the sun moments after we finished I’m confident it was more traumatic for the humans involved than it was for the kids.
Till next week….
