kissin’ babies and savin’ ladies.
Two words: baby bunnies.
Cutest things around.
They’re cuddly, unbelievably soft, and super fun to kiss.
And we have 15 of them.
They’ll all be going to their new homes soon. This particular litter is that of Mrs. Steve. I will post her fabulous photo in our upcoming monthly farm newsletter (because really, who can possibly get enough reading about our failures and escapades and nominal successes?). We are currently learning about color terms and traits like castor, lynx, otter, chinchilla, and locus genetics and percentage coloring based on pedigrees. Farm people are smart, y’all.
Most importantly, however, is that you can hold and love and kiss the babies.
Now on to goats.
I posted on social media a while back that we had made the decision to debud our goat kids. There is controversy around the pros and cons, as there is about most things. And while I’ll not go into that here (you can google it, both sides are completely valid, IMO), I would like to introduce you to Nala.
Nala is new to us; under one week new to us, in fact. She is a Boer goat, otherwise known as a market goat, meat goat, harvest goat, or just plain food to get right down to it. Her breed is indigenous to South Africa, and “Boer” is Dutch for “farmer.” We’re currently naming our goats based on their breed’s country of origin, so Nala it is. We’ll breed her in December to a large, manly buck named Tink (probably not an African name) and have either one or two little Boer babies to sell as harvest goats (or keep one for our family, depending on things). But I digress. A lot.
To swing back around to that whole “debudding” thing, Nala came to us with horns (and she’ll keep them – it’s dangerous to debud a goat past 7-10 days after they’re born). Since Boers are bred and raised for meat production, they are usually part of a larger herd that has larger space and they don’t tend to be debudded.
But ya know what?
THIS happens.
On this day, it happened SIX TIMES.
She is very quiet. She just stood there, waiting patiently, very still, until we NOTICED SHE WAS STUCK.
Two funny things. Nala is not very social and she does not prefer to be handled, touched, or petted. For a goat that would like to just keep to herself, she sure did get a lot of attention and petting and handling yesterday. She was completely grossed out by it.
Second, sister’s got a big head. Yes, her horns weren’t helping, but she’s pretty stocky and it was the width of her head that was posing the problem more than her horns.
We ended up moving goats around, putting the smaller, shorter girls in Nala’s pen and moving Nala to the big goat pen. So far today, no goats have needed saving.
I’m still wearing my superhero cape, though. It’s comfy.
