"United we bargain, divided we beg."

Sunday, April 23, 2017

Haku and the Baby Goats ("Shepherd" Indeed)

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Haku is in love with Bunny, the bottle baby. In this photo, he is clearly saying "mine." After several days of close supervision, we now trust him enough to leave him alone with the baby for, oh, up to five minutes at a time. He doesn't want to hurt her; he wants to lick her vigorously and unceasingly. That, however, is not pleasant for a baby goat. She quickly becomes wet and exhausted and needs to be rescued. 

As Bunny gets older and starts to jump and run more, Haku is becoming less trustworthy. I think his prey drive is engaged when the baby zips erratically around. So far, he has not tried to catch a baby with his teeth - only tried to pounce with his paws. But he has had to be scolded off often. I doubt very much if Haku will ever be entirely trustworthy with any livestock. 

Polly, the latest goat to give birth, certainly doesn't think so. Polly bucked the trend by giving birth easily and without drama to twin doelings. They were both large and energetic, standing up and nursing without help. I think my favorite is this pretty little brown and black girl. The girls have named her Ombre, after the way her colors fade into each other. 


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When I brought Haku into the mama barn to meet the new babies, he tried to lick them and kiss them the way he does with the house baby. Mama Polly was having none of it. She got between Haku and the babies, lowered her horns, and made menacing noises (well, what passes for menacing noises when made by a goat). When Haku persisted, Polly gave him her horns. Apparently deeply offended, Haku responded by growling and snapping at Polly - and I instantly hauled him away and scolded him. He needs to understand that the babies are to be safeguarded and that the mamas are absolutely sacrosanct. 

Maybe I am being a little bit unrealistic about Haku's vocabulary. I'd be happy if he just learned "gentle" and "no." 































Wednesday, April 19, 2017

Beat Up by a Sheep (For the LAST time)



Sometime this past winter, my sister gave us a sheep. A ram, actually. She and her husband raise Jacob's sheep, a heritage breed that is believed to be one of the oldest breeds around. They typically have four horns, and some even have six. They are not large, for sheep. They are a dual purpose breed, bred for meat and wool. They didn't want this particular sheep, my sister explained, "because he is an asshole."
Image result for jacob's sheep
Not ones to look a gift horse (or sheep) in the mouth, we said "thank you," and took him home.
Soon enough, we found out why they didn't want him around. Every time we went into the pasture, he would charge us like a deranged... well.... ram. Although he only weighed about fifty pounds, it still hurt like hell when he bashed into the side of my knee. And he didn't back off when I fought back, either. I took to carrying a stick, and once I hit him hard enough the nose to make him bleed (yes, I felt bad afterwards) but it made no difference to the sheep. He charged regardless.

The obvious solution would have been to kill him immediately, of course, but there were a variety of reasons we didn't do that. Firstly, we thought we could fatten him up. Secondly, the freezer was already full of beef, pork, and salmon. And lastly, Homero just didn't have time, and he is too cheap to let me schedule a professional to do any job he is capable of doing himself.

So we simply lived with the crazy aggressive sheep. I lost track of the number of times he knocked me down, but one instance stands out in my mind. It was mid-winter, and the ground was frozen solid. Over the past few days, it had repeatedly snowed, thawed, and frozen, and so there were a couple inches of ice in the barnyard, with hummocks of frozen dirt and gravel sticking up, and holes here and there as well. Treacherous ground, on which anybody might turn an ankle, irrespective of the need to fight off mentally impaired ovines.

The hose was frozen, so I was filling five gallon buckets directly from the spigot, precariously standing bent over on the ice-slick that surrounded the water pump. The sheep hit me from behind; I never saw him coming. I fell down, of course, and floundered around on the ice, unable to get up. The sheep backed up and charged again. He hit me in the hip, and I sprawled on my belly. I rolled over on my back and wildly flailed my legs trying to fend off his next charge. This ridiculous and humiliating scene went on for some time, until I managed to grab him by the horns and immobilize him. I still couldn't get up, however. My boots slid helplessly on the ice, and I didn't dare let go of the sheep to grab the fence for support. There were a few minutes of detente, the sheep and I frozen in an absurd tableau, catching our breath.

After a while, I managed to stand up, using the sheep himself as support. I lugged him into the barn and somehow closed the door between us. Then I limped back to the house, determined that the sheep had beat me up for the last time. Not so, alas, not so. Over the next few months, the sheep kept me well supplied with bruises. The children could not be sent out to do chores. We more or less lived in fear of this stupid, obstinate animal, himself apparently the victim of an overdeveloped instinct to attack everything that moved.

Recently, the grass finally being grown enough to provide forage, we moved the sheep by himself into the orchard, where he wouldn't interfere with daily chores. This worked fine until yesterday. Yesterday, I took the goats out to browse, and the sight of them moved the sheep to heroic efforts. He escaped, and as soon as he was free, he charged me. This time I saw him coming, and I grabbed him by the horns before he could hurt me. Holding on, I yelled for my husband. While I was waiting for him to run over from the shop, I noticed that one of the ram's four horns was curled back and growing straight into his own skull. As far as I could tell,  it hadn't yet penetrated the flesh, but it was surely uncomfortable, and soon would be downright painful, if it wasn't already. When Homero arrived, I showed him the situation, and said "we have to kill this sheep today."

Luckily, it was a fairly nice afternoon, and so Homero quickly dispatched the ram via a bullet to the back of the head (never the front; the bullet will ricochet off the shelf of thick bone). Within a couple of hours, the evil ram had been reduced to his constituent parts and was fulfilling his ultimate purpose of providing us with tasty protein. According to our personal system of division of labor, Homero deals with the slaughter and the icky parts of skinning, cleaning, and gutting, and delivers the meat to me inside in the form of large hunks - what I believe are called in the trade "primal" cuts - whole legs, shoulder, ribs and belly, back. I take it from there and trim and cut the chunks into reasonable portions as best I can, which isn't all that great since my only education in butchery is a thin book I bought called "home butchery of livestock and game."

The ribs (both sides) went into the oven, slathered with barbecue rub, and cooked on a moderate 325 degrees, covered in tinfoil, for about five hours until they were falling apart tender. That was dinner last night. I broke down the back legs into butt and haunch (I know those aren't the right terms) and packaged four nice roasts for the freezer. Then I took all the rest - shoulder, neck, back - and packed them into my giant tamalero (basically a gigantic spaghetti pot; a steamer) to make broth.

Today I strained the broth, ladled it into gallon ziplock bags for the freezer, and shredded the meat off the bones to be packaged in quart sized ziplock bags in the freezer. Except, of course, for the meat we are using tonight to make tacos de barbacoa de borrego.

Tacos de Borrego:

Make the broth

In a large steamer pot, pack all the mutton pieces (shoulder, neck, ribs, butt, whatever)
add:
1 large onion
1 head garlic, separated
10 chiles guajillo, torn into pieces and seeds shaken out
1 tbsp whole allspice
1/4 cup salt
1 tbsp whole black peppercorns

1 gallon water

cover, seal with foil, and steam 4-6 hours, until meat is falling off the bone

Strain broth and save for another purpose. 
Shred meat off bones and serve on a platter with:

Fresh hot corn tortillas
minced white onion
minced jalapeno peppers
quartered limes
minced cilantro

Raw Green and Cooked red salsa

Green salsa:
10 raw tomatillos, peeled and rinsed
3 serrano chiles
1/2 white onion
cilantro
lime
salt
blend in blender until fairly smooth

Cooked Red salsa:
10 chiles guajillo, toasted, soaked for 1 hour in boiling water
1/4 cup neutral oil, heated until shimmering
1 tsp whole cumin seed
1 clove garlic
1 tbsp apple cider vinegar
salt

Blend soaked chiles, garlic, and vinegar in blender until quite smooth
heat oil in saucepan, add cumin 
pour blended chiles into pan; be careful, it will spit. 
Stir, add salt too taste

To serve:

lay out a platter of steamed shredded mutton, minced vegetables and herbs, quartered limes, hot tortillas, and cubed avocado. Have simple boiled rice on the side. 


















































Saturday, April 15, 2017

Happy Easter/Ostara


Easter is my favorite holiday of the year. Perhaps because my family always made a big deal out it, or perhaps because I live in a part of the world that has such long, grey, wet winters that the coming of spring is an event heartily longed for. Or perhaps because when I first started to learn about pre-Christian European religious traditions, my first mind-blowing revelation was that Easter was named after Ostara, the word for the vernal equinox, and that that word in turn was derived from Oestra - a fertility goddess whose name also serves as the root word of "estrus," the fertile portion of the menstrual cycle, or what is commonly called "heat" in animals. 



I have since learned that the etymology is suspect.  See the link for an excellent article about the history of the modern pagan holiday: 


That doesn't really matter to me - as the article states, muddiness or even deliberate fraud in the interpretation of the holiday does not prevent it from
serving as the basis for valid spiritual
practice. If it did, Easter itself would have no validity for the billions of christians in the world, being an appropriated holiday. But be that as it may, Easter has become the high holiday of Christianity, the celebration of the triumph of Jesus over death.

Ostara, or the vernal equinox by any of the thousand names it has held in thousands of human societies over all of human history,  has always been the celebration of the triumph of life over death. It is an eternal constant of life in the high latitudes of this planet that spring follows fall, as certain as it is that day follows night. 

I'm so glad that I grew up in a four season climate. It makes possible the sacred calendar, and that is the basis of my spiritual life. Easter is the real true new year of my soul - no matter what the calendar says. Happy new year! Rejoice in the color, the bloom, the infant life of the year. 

Sunday, April 9, 2017

Bottle Babies (Happy and Sad)


Bunny, the house goat


Last week, the younger girls and I went to Tucson to visit my dad. While we were gone, two of the does decided to give birth. Does have a sixth sense about the worst possible time to give birth, and that's when they always do it. Not only was I not here to help, but there was a major windstorm going on, too, with gusts up to 65 mph.

The first doe to give birth was our newest, Christmas. She's a first timer. The birth apparently went fine, but nobody noticed until a day (or two?) later. The baby, a single doeling, was dry and fluffy when found, standing up, and had a shriveled umbilical cord, meaning she was at least 24 hours old. She must have nursed on her own. However, Christmas developed a plugged duct or something, and was now showing signs of mastitis - as I surmised from a description of her symptoms over the phone - and was not letting the baby nurse anymore. Baby was going downhill fast, and mama had a lumpy, inflamed udder, which needed immediate attention.

I started spitting out instructions to my poor husband ("Go to the farm store! Buy penicillin! Here's a photo of where to give a goat injections! Milk! Milk! Massage! Massage!"). I called my sister and asked her to come and tube feed the baby, which she did (THANK YOU!!). Sister took the baby home and kept her alive, then handed her off to Rowan who kept her alive for another day, and between them they got her to take a bottle and suck. Meanwhile, Homero gave penicillin shots and milked Christmas, despite her frantic objections, every four hours. It looks like Christmas is going to be fine, and any scarring will be minimal. Hopefully, we won't have another one-teated goat like Flopsy.

Ah, Flopsy. Flops decided to give birth the next day - friday. And unfortunately, when Homero called me, things weren't going to well. There was ONE hoof sticking out of Flopsy's vagina, and nothing else. More frantic instructions. More abject begging, on Facebook this time, to knowledgeable goat people who have experience "going in" and retrieving kids. Thankfully, a wonderful neighbor of mine, who is totally fearless and well experienced, ran right over to help.

But there was bad news. Flopsy was carrying triplets, and two of them were already dead. In fact, from looking at them it was obvious they'd been dead for some time. This is the second year in a row that I've had stillbirths, and I'm going to address the possible causes with the help of my vet as soon as their office opens monday. I know there are several infections that can cause abortions - Chlamydia comes to mind - so I want them all tested. The other possibility is ketosis. Flopsy is quite thin, and the forage is still awful because of the cold wet spring. They have unlimited grass hay, and some grain, but it might not have been enough. It takes a LOT of energy to grow triplets.

Flopsy deciding if will accept the other baby (no)



There was a silver lining though - one of Flopsy's triplets was born alive. A beautiful little spotted doeling. She was very weak, and she needed tube feeding and warming up as well, which my friend very generously provided. After a night of warming and a bellyful of colostrum, she was well enough to stand on her own, so my friend brought her back to mama. And she is doing beautifully, nursing and generally thriving.

I am so grateful to my community! My husband did all he could, and saved the day. My sister and daughter drove all over the county to come and help; and my neighbors came to the rescue. Now I have two gorgeous new doelings instead of none. The only downside is that Bunny, Christmas' baby, will remain a bottle baby. I tried to get her back on her mama, but Christmas wants nothing to do with her. It's too bad, both because bottle babies are a pain in the neck, and also because if Christmas "fails" as a mama on her first try and rejects her baby, she may reject all future babies as well. If that happens, she can still be a good milk goat, but for somebody else. I like my baby goats raised by their own mamas, and out in the barn. Not in the house.

The girls, though, are loving having a house-goat.