My sister has a small farm, with maybe 15 nigerian dwarf goats, dogs and cats, and chickens to come soon. I was visiting her to meet all the baby goats that have been born so far this spring. Mostly nigerian dwarfs are sold to be pets or small sized dairy goats and have a really sweet disposition if they are properly socialized. We sit with them in the morning while they eat some grain to help socialize them and get used to people. They are the sweetest funniest goof balls, and love to bounce and jump on everything around them including you. They love to chew on your hair, your shirt, your fingers. They snuggle up in your lap and will climb on top of each other to get the best position. In short, you can't help but fall in love with them.
The goats at feeding time
In the evening we took three of the does to be disbudded. This is a common procedure for baby goats to remove the horn buds before they can grow into horns. It isn't a pleasant thing to watch, but all the kids seem to recover very quickly from it and it is a low risk procedure when done by an experienced person. All seemed to go well and the girls were up and running and playful in the morning. Sadly, tragedy struck later the next day. While we were gone for a few hours, one of the girls, Cosmo, somehow knocked the area open, possibly on a major blood vessel, and died very quickly from blood loss. It was horrible and tragic, and from what the vet said, a complete freak accident since everything had been looking so good earlier. I was heart broken as she had been holding her just that morning. I think people that breed animals understand that some babies just don't make it and that you have to calculate that as part of the losses of the farm, but it was hard to accept that when it happened so suddenly to such a happy and healthy little thing. When you see a runt of a litter or a tiny baby that develops an illness, you fight for their survival but can somehow accept if they don't make it. But when something that is strong dies suddenly, it feels that life is robbed from them. My sister and I cried and questioned if we could have somehow found her in time or if we could have known something had been wrong, but at the end of the day, all we could do was to say goodbye to Cosmo.
Cosmo on her last morning
I can't end the story like this because that would just be too sad, and because as we all know whenever a life is lost another is born. And thankfully later that day a new life came to the farm. My sister's vet friend had gone to a farm where a sheep was dying from a brain infection. She was pregnant, and so two babies were taken from her as she died. One of them survived and the vet was able to keep it and nurse it as a bottle baby. He was premature and tiny but he lived. Since she doesn't have a farm she gave it to my sister to raise.
Little Huey arrived a few hours after our loss of Cosmo, and he was such an adorable and vulnerable little lamb, we were so happy we could help take care of him.
Huey
We put two sweaters on him and worked to teach him to nurse on the bottles and put him in the warm barn at night under a heat lamp. Every day he has grown stronger and stronger.
We would walk around the yard with little lamb Huey bumbling around after us and he was completely adorable. He is growing to be friends with Bubba, a baby buck my sister got who is also a bottle baby. It is strange to think that he may grow to be up to 300 lbs some day.
So for this suburban girl who is not hardened to the ways of farm life, it was a very emotional day.
Full of heartbreak and tears and joy and laughter.
Life is an intense thing; whether it is the life of an animal or a human, it is full to the brim with...well... life;
and it will always be hard to say good bye.
Bubba
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