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)