Who Can Resist These Goats??

Last year was a very good year for selling baby goats. I sold seven out of eight babies, for a mean average of $160 apiece. That's a great price for goats around here. I made $1,100, which easily paid for hay and feed, and even vet bills, making all of our milk and meat essentially free - except for the labor involved, of course.

This year, I haven't got even one phone call regarding my adorable spotty Nubian babies, even though I dropped the price considerably from last year's. I have seen goats - purebred goats!- advertised at less than $50 on Craigslist. I won't sell mine that cheaply. They are worth more to me as meat. Although, to be honest, I have no desire to put six or eight goats in the freezer. We'd never eat them all! I like goat meat, in fact when well done it's superior to lamb, in my opinion, but I still don't like it as much as I like beef or pork.

Plus, if all my does are feeding triplets, if I can't sell off even a few of them, then I won't have very much milk, now will I? And milk, my friends, is the whole point of goats. I guess I'd rather sell a baby for $50 than kill a baby that doesn't even have 10 pounds of meat on her yet and is heart-wrenchingly adorable to boot. Well, it's early yet. Iris' babies have several weeks of enticing cuteness left in them. And Django and Flopsy have yet to give birth.

I am also not having any luck finding someone who wants to trade bucks with me. I can't use Cloud again next year; I need new blood. But so far, the two people who responded to my ad were unsuitable - one guy wanted a registered buck, and the other guy wanted to trade me a one month old crossbreed for Cloud, a proven purebred.

Why can't they invent a mammal that gives milk without needing to give birth first, the way chickens lay eggs without breeding?