Got Your Goat?
We gave my sister a goat. He recently butted his way into her tomato patch and ate all her tomatoes and did other nasty things to her dogs. Brutus is her male Great Dane and propriety forbids that I go into detail about what her goat did to him.
Goats are cute, especially when they're young. They also reproduce prolifically, which is why I have some "elastrators," a device that clamps a rubber band around the little males’ testicles, cuts off the blood, and essentially castrates them. Don't know if that would have helped save my sister’s tomato plants, but it might have been a desirable benefit to Brutus. Keith and Janis, our goat raising friends from Odessa, came last weekend and showed me how to do this elastration thing. We proceeded to curtail future generations of goats at our ranch. The goats don't seem to like it much, but we have a small pasture and limited space and forage for goat infinity.
Our small pasture is divided into two parts. We just fenced off the "other" part so we could have two herds, one for each Billy Goat, Abednigo and Rocky. The fun part was moving some of the goats from one pasture to the other. We used a leash, and I dragged Abednigo and Clementine over by myself. This required dragging them out one gate, across the main road on our property, and through the new gate to the other pasture, their hooves firmly planted before them.
Yesterday, Katherine and I dragged Sweet Pea and Petunia over to join Abednigo and Clementine, but we forgot to put the dogs up (two Labradors, Brady and Rufus). Katherine was at one gate; I was at the other, tethered goat in hand, when Brady decided that he would like to eat Sweet Pea and clamped his salivating mouth on her hind leg. Rufus, an 80-pound puppy that admires and duplicates everything his idol does, joined in. Katherine, Sweet Pea, Brady, and Rufus became a whirling cloud of dust, goat hair and slather. I was at the other gate tethered to Petunia. I hastily chained Petunia's leash to the post and went over to help, but I forgot to close the gate behind me—a HUGE mistake.
While Katherine and I were in the process of removing Brady from Sweet Pea’s hind leg and forcing her, dogless, into the other pasture, both steers and about a half dozen goats escaped through the gate I had left open. The dogs, now freed from Sweet Pea’s leg, decided to chase everyone available around the barn. We had to
- Get rid of Sweet Pea and Petunia (who was still chained to the other gate).
- Catch the dogs and lock them in the barn so they'd shut up and quit chasing everyone.
- Herd the goats back through the gate.
- Chase the steers using a fishing pole as a cattle prod (only thing handy), finally luring them back with a bucket of cattle feed.
- Beat dogs soundly with fishing pole. (You’ve heard of goat roasts? We may have a dog barbecue!)
Brady is already neutered, or I promise, he'd be proudly wearing his new elastrator!