It started when I was up at the slaughterhouse picking up the pork from this winter's crop of pigs. I was wandering around the premises looking for Lewis, the head honcho there. I found him in the barn, helping some of the employees move a herd of goats into the chute leading to the slaughterhouse door. I noticed that some of the goats were obviously pregnant. Lewis explained his difficult position of needing goats to satisfy his orders, yet this time of year, many that were sent to him were pregnant, and since he paid by the pound, slaughtering a pregnant doe was not only unfortunate, but unprofitable.
I said, "Lewis, why don't you sell me those that are obviously pregnant, and I'll take them and use them to start my goat herd?" I had been planning to get ten or fifteen goats this year anyway, so this could be a way to spare some goats for the time being, and allow them to have their babies, as well as get my goatherd started and save Lewis money. Everyone's happy. So, Lewis agreed, and helped me cull out five goats that were most obviously pregnant.
Last year we raised two goats for the summer. We bought them as babies at the livestock auction for about $15 apiece, and sold them five months later for nearly $45 apiece. We didn't feed them much, but let them out in a small pasture that had been overgrown with thorn bushes, which they promptly reduced to almost nothing.
I wish I could find a stock that would do so well.
Because of our positive experience with them last year, we decided to try them again this year on a slightly larger scale. I hope to have a larger area fenced off soon, and would like to get maybe ten or fifteen goats this time. I hadn't planned on getting any already, but with the situation at the slaughterhouse, I figured this was worth moving up the schedule.
So, last Tuesday, I came home with five pregnant does. I promptly realized that, as usual, I had gotten in over my head. Fortunately, one of my best friends is a FANTASTIC vet, and loves to help out on the farm. He assured me that goats are pretty good at birthing and raising babies, which was a relief, since there aren't many goat midwives in this area.
Then the fun began.
The morning after we got them home, Mason, my four-year-old son, decided to "liberate" the goats, and let the gate swing open while I was in feeding them. Four of the five promptly disappeared in a matter of seconds.
We live in a very secluded place, which backs up to 6000 acres of state park. The rest of the county that we are in, however, is quite crowded and suburban. I looked for the goats for a couple of hours, and didn't see a trace of them. Finally, I went to work, about an hour late.
That afternoon I resumed my search. Almost immediately I spotted them in a clearing under some power lines that run by our property. This began a chase that ultimately involved my wife, two friends, and myself. We chased them in circles for an hour, finally losing them in the falling darkness. We trudged back home, frustrated and exhausted.
For the rest of the week I rose at dawn and searched for the goats until it was time to go to work, then again in the evening until dark. They have been sighted nearly every day, and eventually we caught one under a neighbor's barn.
Today I called the Gaithersburg humane society, to ask if anyone had reported a stray goat. This is when it started to get funny.
Since you could probably count the farms left in our county on both hands, the county animal control people aren't very used to dealing with farm animals. This became quite evident at the first question that Cathy, the lady at the shelter asked when I reported the goats missing.
"What are their names?" was her first question.
I didn't say anything for a moment, being unprepared for this kind of question. "Uh...they are goats. They don't have names."
"I'm sorry, but it must have a name to be entered in our database."
"Cathy," I repeated, more slowly this time, "It is a GOAT!"
"I'll have to call you back."
Several minutes later, the phone rang. It was Cathy, this time she sounded more excited.
"I found your goat! Her name is Dolly!"
I was befuddled. "How did you find that out, did you ask her?"
"No!" Cathy replied, "we just assigned her that name so we'd have something to put in the database."
"Whatever, so how did you find her?" I asked.
"Someone reported a black goat in their front yard, and we went and picked it up!" It turned out that the goat had only gone about a two miles from our house, to a small subdivision. It must have gotten separated from the other two, who were still missing.
"Great!" I said. "I'll come get it right away!"
Upon arrival, I approached the desk at the animal shelter. "I'm here to collect my goat." I said.
The lady at the desk didn't look up from her terminal. "Name!"
"Chuck Holton"
"No, the pet's name."
"It's not a pet, it's a goat!"
Another employee piped up from across the room. "That's Dolly!" she said.
"You can call her whatever you want," I said, smiling. "But she won't come to it. What's this going to cost, by the way?"
"Probably about thirty dollars." The serious lady at the desk continued, typing at her terminal.
"Did you bring proof of ownership?"
"Like what?" I asked.
"Registration papers, or a license."
"Papers? This is a GOAT, a farm animal! I don't have any papers!
"Can you describe the goat?"
"It's black, it has no horns, and it's pregnant."
"Do you know what breed it is?" The lady asked.
"Do you?" I retorted.
"NO, I don't know anything about goats." She answered.
I wondered why she had asked then. "It's a meat goat." I offered.
She looked up at me for the first time. It wasn't a nice look.
"A what?"
So, I launched into the story about how I had saved these goats from the slaughterhouse kill pen, and by the time I had finished, the small group of employees that had assembled had gone from looking at me like I had three heads, to something akin to Oscar Schindler.
Another female employee spoke up. "Come on, I'll show you to your goat."
As we walked down the hallway leading outside, the teenaged employee asked, "Why wasn't Dolly wearing a collar?"
I rubbed my temples. "BECAUSE SHE'S A GOAT!"
"Oh, right." She answered.
She led me outside to a large chain link kennel, where two male employees were chasing Dolly around in circles with a plastic bucket.
"What are you guys doing?" I asked.
"Trying to milk this goat, we think she wants to be milked." They said.
"It doesn't look like it to me," I retorted. "Besides, she doesn't need to be milked, she hasn't had her babies yet!"
"Oh,” They looked disappointed.
Ten minutes later, Dolly and I were headed home in the farm truck. The shelter had waived the fees, and I was two down, and two to go.
Hopefully, the story of the last two missing goats will have a happy ending too. Isn't homesteading fun!
For those of you who are wondering about how and why the slaughterhouse does so many goats, the operation processes about 150 goats a day for the east coast market, mostly Hallal (think Muslim kosher) butcher shops and restaurants. The goats come from all over the country, these were from a large ranch in Texas, and had just shown up the night before. As I began talking to Lewis about them, he began complaining that this time of year, many of the goats that he gets are pregnant, which reduces his profit into the negative column, since he pays by the pound, and is in essence paying for water in a pregnant doe. That is not to mention the unfortunate loss of the unborn kids. This is what created the learning opportunity that I had last week. If I don't get the other two back, I'll have to chalk the loss up to life's tuition, and I may have started a wild goat population in our area, since there really aren't any predators out there to threaten them.
I'll be posting more about the goats in the coming days, asking for advice about how to handle pregnant does.
Does anyone know how long the gestation period is for goats?
-- 
Chuck (woah@mission4me.com), February 25, 2002