My Goat

I absolutely adore goats. Especially baby ones! So when my mammaw called me and she said, “I found you a little goat, it’s black”! I was absolutely ecstatic. I checked out and drove to my mammaws house to pick it up. She maybe weighed five pounds and she was all black except a white spot on her belly. I fell in love instantly. When I was taking her home, she laid down in the floorboard and slept all the way to Mid-Mountain, because I had to get goat replacer milk there. We got home and she followed me around like a little puppy and she slept in my lap and she maybe drank 5 tablespoons of milk at one time.

Rose the day I brought her home. In April

The hard thing about goats in that they come into this world trying to figure out how to die. This multiplies if they are not on their mother's milk, but on milk replacer. Rose stayed sick for two months, and I had to give her antibiotic shots every week to keep her immune system up because right after a week, she would be sick again. Also, she scratched constantly because she was absolutely covered in fleas. So I had to give her a shot for fleas, and give her a bath twice a week in the bathtub with a special soap to soothe her skin. I took her to vet eventually after she was breathing raspy, and the response I got: “Well, there is nothing I can do, goats die a lot and especially since this one is on milk replacer, she will probably die anyways, sorry.” I was very angry by the response I got from him, so I just took care of her myself, and she ended up doing fine once she got to be about two and a half months old. I kept her in the house as long as I could until she was bouncing off the couches. At night, I kept her a dog crate in our sun room.

She was a month old here.

At the same time, I had three bottle calves so dad made me a lot in front of our house for them plus Rose. I wanted it close since we had bad problems with wild dogs killing my calves at our barn where they would be alone up there. Rose did not like the lot, she liked the house. But eventually she just accepted it and followed the calves around. When she would get out, she liked to chase my dog, Bear, and butt him with her new horns that had come in. We had been grilling one day this summer and Rose was on the back porch with us, and we had been swimming and had just put the pool blanket on for the evening. Well, here comes Rose, hop hop hop, and then right into the pull and she sunk like a rock, so I just start freaking out and yelling at Josh to get her, so he jumped in and tossed her out, and from that day on she did not get around the pool again. One day this summer that nobody was home, Rose went missing and Josh and I looked all around the house, and we asked the neighbors if she might have gotten in with theirs, but she had not. I never found her. (569)

My Pigeon

I always have been and always will be utterly terrified of birds, no matter if they are little or big. That is the exact reason that I never would have imagined myself taking one in and caring for it while it was hurt. I did take one in, however. I was leaving school one evening and there was a big group of people standing out in the parking, they were laughing so loudly. I walked over there and asked what was so funny and I barely heard someone say “that pigeon hit the light pole” and then I see a guy carrying a bird back towards us. He said he found it outside the weight room door and brought it down to the parking lot and threw it up in the air and it hit the only pole in the parking lot. He then threw it in the air again and it landed head first on the pavement and then seemed to struggle to get up. So then someone said, “throw it up and let me hit it with this bat”, the human race at its finest. To which I thought I was explode from anger hearing that, I grabbed the pigeon from them and told them what I thought about them and I let it sit in my floorboard on the way home. I named the bird Pebbles, I thought it was a very unisex name, obviously.

Pebbles.

Pebbles could not walk straight, drink water, fly or eat food. I gave him water mixed with electrolytes through a syringe. He did not want to come out of the box I had given him to sleep in, and he pooped green. When he went to eat any food, it would just fall back out of his mouth. I did not think he would live very long at all. Also, he tremored continuously, it made me dizzy watching him shake so fast he was blurry. I had him barricaded in a room past our laundry room by having jugs set across the doorway. I had him confined there, and one day I opened the laundry room door and he was sitting there staring at me, in the wrong room to which I screamed like a child, because once again, I am terrified of birds and he was not where I left him. Josh had to put him back in the box before I would go back there to take care of him. About three weeks of having him, he finally was able to eat food normally and drink water on his own, which overjoyed me.

Then Josh had the idea one day to take him outside and see if he could fly yet while I was busy doing something else, my pigeon then proceeded to fly on top of the house and stay. So I was crying that he was gonna freeze to death that night or get ate, in June mind you. We had a bag of tennis balls, so what do we do? We threw tennis balls trying to make Pebbles come back off the house. Which did not work by the way, so we ended up spraying him off with a water hose.
Mom put him in the barn hoping he would make other bird friends, to which he stayed in the same spot for two days and then when I was leaving for work one morning, he was sitting next to the driveway. After that, he would just sit in the driveway all day, so mom bought him a bird bath, to which he stood in all day, everyday. I honestly did not think he would live very long, yet I had him for three months before my cats got him while I was gone. That is my story of having my first and only bird.