1/18/2012
We live in a place where goats and sheep still dot the pastoral landscape, blithely nibbling on the weeds and vines that pickier ruminants find less palatable. Some farmers keep goats to keep their fence lines clean or hilly acreage from going to prickly blackberry vines, thorny locust trees, and cedar trees. In addition to their landscaping services, goats can provide entertainment, companionship, milk and milk products, and meat. You may have heard the expression, “He really got your goat.” It's not just the loss of a cloven hoofed friend that would drive someone to use some variation of that line. The expression comes to us from the horse racing world. Horses are social animals, so being taken from their home herd and kept in confinement during travel can be extremely stressful to a racehorse. Since horses are also large animals it is inconvenient to ship a racehorse along with a horse friend, so sometimes racehorses are given a goat friend who can travel with them. If an immoral competitor takes your racehorse's goat—being the flighty, emotionally fragile creatures that they are—the theft may leave your horse so bereft that he will not be fit to win the race. Quite literally, that scoundrel “got your goat.”
It's kidding season right now in our area for people who are fortunate (or unfortunate) enough to have goats. Our farm is counted among those. Our headcount started at four, including only one male. The goats came from a herd where the males and females were kept together all the time. When I asked a friend who raises goats if he thought the females were bred, his answer was, “Well, if they ain't, you should shoot that billy.”
Thirteen days ago, at approximately 11:15pm, we heard one of our goats make a strange noise. We were expecting, though not prepared for, kids. We rushed into the cold night and found a single baby goat gurgling sad little noises through the placenta leftovers that its mother was not cleaning off of it. We cleaned the baby and tried to help it nurse, but its mother wanted nothing to do with the baby, and her milk wasn't flowing. Being both unprepared for and unwilling to take on bottle feeding a baby, we closed the baby in with the mother and went back to bed. In the morning the kid was still alive but cold, so we brought it inside and warmed it up. A friend came to pick up the baby, and together we were able to get the mother's milk flowing, and the kid had its first drink of colostrum.
Colostrum is a the first milk produced by any mammal mother. It contains high concentrations of nutrients, and it's important that newborns get a bellyful as soon as possible. It boots up the baby's immune system and kicks their little bodies into a new modality of being: life outside the womb.
That day we absolutely affirmed our decision that we have no interest whatsoever in going into the goat business. We hauled our billy and the newly not-pregnant female to a goat sale that day. That evening the two remaining females started groaning and stretching. In shifts we checked on them every two hours that whole night. At seven in the morning I woke up and looked out my window at the goat pen just in time to see the first kid drop.
In ten more minutes that same female had given birth to two more kids, and she was doing a great job cleaning them off. Our other nanny was helping to clean the mewing newborns until she went into labor herself. In quick succession she dropped twins. The black one came out flailing, and both moms got busy cleaning up those babies.
There were a few gaps between the boards of our goat manger. Immediately the more agile of the wobbly legged babies toddled to the gap, thew her still-elastic legs through the space, and started hobbling through. Commandment One for being a goat: break fence.
Then the suckling began. Except all the teats were blocked with wax plugs. It's as disgusting as it sounds; little bits of dirt, skin, and detritus that block up the teat. We soaked the teats in warm water and then squeezed. All that practice in middle school squeezing pimples came in handy. Finally the milk came in a solid stream, and we helped each of the babies get a bellyful of colostrum.
But the milk was only flowing on one of the moms, Dolly, who has turned out to be a super mom. She allows the other female's babies to nurse with her own. After several sessions of soaking Mildred's abnormally long teats and massaging her alarmingly huge utter her milk finally came. We held her still and helped her twins nurse then milked her to alleviate some of her obvious discomfort.
The next morning one of Dolly's three babies was writhing with his head flopped back in a horrible position, and he was making a pathetic, sad little noise. His mouth was cold, and his eyes were lolling around in their sockets. We warmed up some milk from the night before and bottle fed him by holding his head up, prying his mouth open to squirt in the milk, then massaging his throat to make him swallow, all while holding him against us to warm him back up. The energy it takes to carry out the digestion process helps keeps new kids warm. After a few swallows we took him upstairs in basket and tucked him in with a warm water bottle. A couple hours later I fed him again. When I was feeding him again a few hours later his head flopped back and he died. Just like that.
The other four babies spent the day nursing from Dolly and being coddled by Mildred. When we checked on them that night they were all snuggled in a pile. The next morning one of Mildred's kids laid down and his head flopped back. He died a couple hours later.
When this paper comes out the remaining three kids will be two weeks old. We have been giving Mildred warm sage tea with honey to dry her up because none of the kids were able to nurse from her low-hanging teats, and she's not socialized well enough to be a calm milk goat. She's drying up quickly, but she stays in the pen with the kids while Dolly takes nursing breaks to mow our neighbor's yard in exchange for free
organic fertilizer.Of our three remaining kids, we have a female from each mother and one male. We've named all three: Geri, Sandy, and Rocky, and we're smitten with them all. But we are not a hobby goat farm. We're a market garden farm, and our garden keeps us busy year round, whether there are plants in it or not. We have no plans to breed the two mothers again. They're both old, and Mildred can't nurse. We will breed and subsequently milk one of their daughters next year, but it won't be to little Rocky. Our plan for Rocky is to raise, slaughter, process, and eat him ourselves.
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1/25/2012
One of the most rewarding parts of gardening is watching a diminutive, dry seed undergo the metamorphisis that turns the seed into a seven foot tall tangle of serrated leaves and vines laden with glistening ripe tomatoes, then to a shriveled heap of nondescript rotting plant material, and ultimately into an indistinguishable component of the soil.
Equally rewarding, but more emotionally charged, is the undertaking of raising your own animal for meat. Styrofoam and cellophane packaging put the production of meat at a comfortable distance from the consumer, the eater. I've heard many people say that they eat meat but could never kill an animal or that they don't even like handling raw meat. In my opinion that is an outrageous affront to the life that hunk of meat represents.
The farmer that raises animals for meat sees that animal's life through, from beginning to end. If the birthing is difficult, maybe the farmer has to assist the mother. If the newborn is weak or abandoned sometimes it will have to be bottle fed, hand raised. If the birth occurs in cold weather the infant might need to be brought into the house to be warmed by the stove or heater. All this for the same animal that will soon be killed, slaughtered, and eaten.
For the homesteader or small farmer, the relationship between animal and human caretaker can be even more intimate. We know and have a personal relationship with each of our five goats. They have distinct personalities, behaviors, and even distinct grazing area preferences. If we had two hundred goats, there wouldn't be enough time in the day to get to know each one. One of our herd of five is a three week old male named Rocky.
When Rocky came out he looked meager and weak. He didn't mew as loudly as his siblings, and it took him longer to hobble to his feet. Now he is an enthusiastic nurser and gaining weight quickly. He is rambunctious and loves to leap straight up, all four feet in the air. He just melts into a puddle if you pick him up and put him on your lap. His horns are coming in the fastest and are already poking above his rock hard little skull.
However we don't want him to breed his mother, aunt, sister or cousin, which he can do as early as eight weeks. So we have decided to raise him for meat. When he has fattened up a little we will carry out the entire process ourselves, from shooting him, to slaughtering him, and ultimately, to having a party with all of our friends to eat him.
Many commercially raised animals do not live fulfilling lives; that is, as Joel Salatin puts it, they're not able to express their animal-ness. Cows are on this earth to eat grass, chickens to scratch dirt, and goats to break fences. When you keep a cow shoulder to shoulder with his compatriots and knee deep in muddy manure, he is not able to express his cow-ness.
Temple Grandin has done much to revolutionize the slaughterhouses that turn cows into hunks of beef. Her systems are often simple and are designed for cows, not for the people in charge of the cows. Her autism allows her to see the world in a way much more similar to the way animals see the world than the way humans without autism see the world. Thus she is able to design ramps and runs that cattle blithely and calmly make their way through, making the process more efficient, and ultimately more profitable, for the processor.
We raise our animals by trying to take a similar approach. What is goat-ness? For brush goats, it seems to be climbing on rocks, tearing honeysuckle vines out of trees and fencelines, sunny warm days, and a general abhorrence for both fences and cold, wet weather. These are the things we will try to provide to Rocky while he's with us. He gets to bound across our rock walls and headbutt his sister on these glorious, unseasonably warm days we've been having. He nurses as much as his grumpy mother will allow, and he has a heat lamp and clean, soft hay to sleep in. When he's done nursing, he'll have as much green grass and honeysuckle as he cares to forage for, hay, and the ultimate farm treat, a little grain every day.
He also has three adoring humans who are happy to scratch his head and butt. He'll have every opportunity to express his goat-ness however it pleases him, until one day when he'll be eating a little bit of grain, and then, for him, everything will end. Just like that.
It will be gratifying to eat an animal that I know had a healthy, gratifying life. I will know exactly what medications, hormones, or supplements were or were not used in his lifetime. I will know what he ate. I'll see his insides and will know if he had a healthy liver. We'll probably eat his liver. I'll know that he died a painless, instant death.
We thought about naming him Steak or Porkchop, but we ended up with Rocky. He's the plumpest of our three babies, and I think about how delicious he'll be when I'm petting his fat little belly. We are truly enjoying his presence, and we don't snuggle him any less frequently than we snuggle the two females, who we'll keep and breed next year. I have no compunction with raising this adorable little animal with the intention of eventually killing him. If we are able to provide him a stress-free life and stress-free death with lots of grass and few fences in between, I see no moral objection.
For me, personally, the killing of the animals we eat is the worst part; I don't mind the processing at all. I hate killing the chickens, and I'm not looking forward to killing Rocky. I believe that if everyone had to kill their own animals for meat, everyone would eat a lot less meat. We appreciate the chicken stock we have in freezer and savor those pots of chicken and dumplings. We eat a lot more deer than we do chicken since chicken is way more labor intensive to come by on a pound per pound basis. I am happy I don't have to raise my own cows, so I gratefully pay my neighbors for their cows and happily work-trade with my friends for their milk.
All the meat we consume, whether from the store, the forest, or a farm, came from an animal that to some extent had an internal life—that was aware of its own existence. That you didn't personally shoot, behead, or slaughter the animal in the grocery store doesn't make you any less responsible for its death. The hands-on raising of an animal for your own table heightens your awareness of the sentience of the animals whose lives we take for our sustenance. Slaughtering an animal forces you to inspect in every visceral detail the condition of the animal at the time of its death; if you had poor management practices, you'll see the pocked liver or stressed condition of the organs.
The entire undertaking provides you an opportunity to ponder questions like, “If goats have preferences, does that mean that they have thoughts? If animals have thoughts, what differentiates animals thoughts from human thoughts, or animal experiences from human experiences? Do dogs and cats have a richer internal life, or heightened level of sentience, than a goat? Where do human babies fall on the scale of sentience and richness of internal lives? At what level of sentience does it become morally reprehensible to eat an animal? If you didn't have opposable thumbs, how would you kill a goat?”
Or even if your mind doesn't wander that far, at least in the end you get a full belly on account of those opposable thumbs.
