Another week and another goat life saved.
I gotta say, I really enjoy goats. Except when they are places where they shouldn’t be.
Like here. This picture doesn’t really make any sense, so let me provide some perspective.
I’m standing on top of what is technically known as a ‘Large Square Bale’. LSB’s come in a variety
of sizes but they all have one thing in common – they’re quite big. Generally, they are 3’x3’x8′, sometimes 3’x4’x8′.
They can weigh several hundred pounds. For my metric people thats 1 meter x 1 meter x 2.5 meters and several hundred kilograms. I went looking for a picture that made some kind of sense and have come up lacking so, yeah.
They’re big. In this photo, I’m standing on one looking down. Why?
Because I had been taking care of my boys sore hoof and I kept hearing some really weird noises coming from the interior of the haybales. Turns out this goat had slipped down between the bales, all the way to ground level and was wedged between the pallets at the bottom. Now, 3ft doesn’t really sound that impressive until you’re alone with a stuck goat and several hundred pounds of hay that have to be forked out to get to her.
However, 15 minutes of some serious cardio exercise, some caprine finagling and I had this.
It’s a girl! I wish there had been camera footage it had to be hilarious watching me dangle over the interior edge of this haybale trying to get a goat to stand up.
As you can see, I did have to use my horse rope to lift her up to her feet. At this point all I had left to do was climb down into the crack with her and give her a boost up. I’ve no idea how long she had been stuck but she took the longest pee I’d ever seen a goat take so I’m guessing it was awhile.
Sadly, I can’t always be there.
This goat was killed when the haybale they had been nibbling on collapsed on top of her.
Poor wee thing. Unfortunately, its really difficult to keep these guys out of places they REALLY want to be.
Which does include the haybale pile.
Feeding cows is fun. So one of those haybales (the one the little black goat fell down behind) had at some point gotten wet and was rotting from the inside. (This made it REALLY FUN AND ENJOYABLE to work with to liberate le trapped goat, I might add). After all else was said and done, I forked up all the yuck-hay into the truck and tossed it into the field. I was bummed that it was going to waste. Except that it didn’t. There’s 9 cows in this picture – but there were more gather along the sides of the truck. They freaking LOVED it. Even the llama came in and got some. So what I thought was nasty ended up making these guys happy. Weird.
Thats the bull standing behind them. I call him BigBeefy. He hasn’t told me his name and I’m content to just guess. Bulls being bulls, and all.
In other news – my boys hoof is getting back to normal and he has returned to his regularly scheduled pasture based agenda. During my December 5th visitation, I did however notice something odd. A little bit of poking and prying revealed that the entire underside of his hoof was peeling away. Lovely.
Upon reflection it made sense. If you had an ENORMOUS blister on the sole of your foot, and it ruptured and drained and then dried up you would be left with a big pocket of skin that you would probably peel off. That’s what happened here.
No wonder he was in such pain – that abscess pocket was darned near the entire width and length of the underside of his foot. We’ve discussed it. While this was a fascinating learning experience, neither of us have any intention of doing this ever again.
This is Copper, my boys girlfriend. He has good taste. She would regularly stop by during my visits and keep an eye on everything. She’s an large paint draft horse. Very friendly, but also very large.
For things completely NOT livestock related, we recently did a batch of cinnamon buns:
There was also a chocolate tart for Dave’s birthday that I utterly neglected to take a picture of but don’t worry, I’m thinking about making it again soon.
And in the ‘Um, What??’ category –
STUFFING FARCE.
There’s even a gluten free version. You know, just in case you require a gluten free improbable situation with slapstick turkey conclusions.
xD
~K~
The Katbox... 