Snowing this morning. Bleh.

We’re on kid watch with Jessamine, who surprised us by being pregnant. She’s due any time, ED thinking there’s some possibility that there may be kids waiting for us at the barn this morning.

Today’s as good a day as any to offer some of our recent educational goat experiences:

• Heath Family Poisoning Saturday morning we discovered Maggie sick and vomiting, and we noticed that the dog hobble by the springhouse had been worked over hard, complete with clear bite marks taken out of the (remaining) leaves. I’ve read that heath family poisoning is one of the few things that will cause goats to vomit (there are others—more on that later): rhododendron, azalea, dog hobble, laurel. I know several people who have lost goats to rhodo, and we’ve had some mighty sick ones, though (knock wood) no fatalities. We treated Maggie with 10 grams of vitamin c as a drench, and though she was mighty sick all day, by yesterday morning she was her usual obnoxious self.

• Parasites Maggie had been dealing with a heavy worm load since she kidded. Normally we worm the day they kid, and for some reason we forgot with Maggie. I noticed she seemed awfully thin, and then one morning she showed up with bottle jaw. Yikes! We gave her a heavy dose of cydectin (all her milk is going to babies), and over the next couple of days the bottle jaw got worse, which isn’t surprising, as her body was dealing with the waste products of tons of dying haemonchus contortus worms. The day we found her poisoned, the bottle jaw was the worst yet, huge and pendulous with an edematous area in the center, which created confusion for a while in what we were actually dealing with. Then yesterday morning the bottle jaw was gone. I think she was worming herself! She’s pretty much always had access to rhododendron and dog hobble, so why on earth did she suddenly gobble huge amounts of it? As an interesting aside, all our goats eat small amounts of rhodo all the time. It used to absolutely panic us until we realized that they always do it, whether we’re aware of it or not, and that they never have any ill effects from it (until now, but this was an unprecedented amount).

• Founder A couple of weeks ago our two bucks, Robin and Jasper took a stroll down to the house and discovered a bag of feed on the front porch, upon which they proceeded to gorge themselves. When the girls discovered them at the barn they were bellowing in pain, standing with their obviously sore feet splayed out, kicking at their bellies, and they were both completely encrusted (completely encrusted) in vile chartreuse vomit. I made a drench of epsom salts in water (a tablespoon of epsom salts each), giving it to them in a syringe, a process which resulted in violent vomiting accompanied by violent head-slinging. The bucks were both perfectly fine the next day, with no residual soreness in their feet, but the clothes the girls and I were wearing will never be the same again.

Now it’s snowing hard. I bought blinds for the windows here by my desk; I think I’ll put them up now so I can close them.