Trader of Goats

This weekend was spent finishing up a temporary (yet sturdy) goat pen, picking up two goats from a local farm, receiving one "rental" buck goat at our farm, trading one of the previously picked up goats for the stud service, breeding one of our does to the rental goat and receiving another doe that we had sold last year.

Your head spinning?  Mine still is.

The New, New Goat (as opposed to our not-so-new goat named, unoriginally, New Goat) had been with her doeling up until the day I traded her.  In anticipation of trading the doeling, I locked the kid up in the barn pen until the family who was taking her (and dropping off the rental stud) got to the house.  There was a lot of goat yelling.  And after the goat swapping had occurred and the family made their way home, you could hear the bleating of the little doeling all the way up to the highway.

I also trimmed the hooves of the new new goat, administered meds to both her and Pickles (more on that later) and started training the new new goat to the milk stand.  She's a little bit kicky, but seeing as I don't think she's ever been milked, she did pretty well.

The new new goat on the left, (not so) New Goat on the right.

Olivia was sold to a friend last spring.  She decided that goat keeping was not in her best interest so she said I could have her back if I wanted her.  She had already started drying Olivia up, so I'll just stop milking her and have her bred to the rental buck.

Welcome back to the herd, Olivia!  

She is Annette's kid from Spring 2012.

Merv the Perv (yes, that's his name), our Rent-a-Buck.

The buck we're renting is named Merv and he has already serviced New Goat.  Very enthusiastically, at that.  I don't know if it's Nigerian Dwarf bucks in general, but he and our previous Nigerian buck, Pan, seem to be overachievers when it came to breeding the ladies.  Technically, I've only seen one Saanen buck, one Nubian buck, one Boer buck and two Nigerian bucks doing their thing, but the Nigerians seem to take the cake when it comes to receptiveness and willingness during breeding.  Wonder if they're trying to make up for their small, uhm, stature.

Anyhow, we're still going to keep Merv around for another two weeks to make sure the breeding took.  He's a pretty nice guy, but I'm still going to use a long stick to scratch him.  I forgot how much Nigerians stink.