Joli and Toffee

“Are you sure that Toffee is…well, all girl?” Rich said.

“What do you mean?” I asked, offended, stroking Toffee’s satiny coat. The goat kid was curled up in my lap in the big armchair, her blue-grey eyes closed in languid satisfaction.

“Weelll,” he said, “it’s just that she doesn’t have any horn buds.”

I knew that, but I thought it was a good thing. After all, for each goat kid that had horn buds, they had to go to the vet for a de-horning operation that felt vaguely medieval - the blood! the screaming! the red hot iron! It was pretty horrible.

“The gene for a polled goat (one born without horns) is often linked with the one for hermaphrodites,” he pressed on. He showed me the book.

There was a diagram of genetic patterns there, female goats and male goats drawn with horns and without, breeding and producing progeny that either had horns or didn’t. I studied it for a minute, but couldn’t make any sense out of it.

“What are you saying?” I said, starting to get alarmed.

He read out loud. “The hermaphrodite looks like a doe externally, but it actually has male organs internally. Not all have obvious external abnormalities. Carefully examine the vulva of newborn kids. A growth about the sizer of a pea at the bottom of the vagina is abnormal. Unusual behavior in a normal appearing doe kid is cause for suspicion. Intersex goats are often overly aggressive or unusually withdrawn. Hermaphrodites should be destroyed.”

“No!” I said, clutching Toffee. There has just been too much killing, dying and culling recently.

“It’s up to you,” Rich said, shrugging.

We looked at Toffee’s - well, female bits. Or he-she bits. Whatever.

There did, indeed, seem to be a pea-sized growth there. Crap.

“But I’m attached to her now!” I said.

“You can keep her as a pet,” Rich said. “I don’t mind.”

But strangely, the thought that Toffee might be a he-she did start to affect the way that I felt about her over the next day or so. Whereas before I had simply seen her as a nanny kid, now I started to watch her behavior with critical eyes. Was she unusually aggressive? She was certainly athletic and lively, leaping around and racing much more than I remember Eira doing. But then, this could all be guess work - we didn’t even know if she was really a hermaphrodite.

And if she was, we could still keep her. After all, our goats aren’t a money-making endeavor anyway - they are more of an expensive hobby. We don’t have to cull for financial purposes. Buddug is too old to kid now - going bald, even - but we keep her because she’s retired, and we love her.

But, pressed on a logical, cold corner of my brain, you only have room for a certain number of goats in the herd. Over the next twelve years, Toffee will occupy a space in the stalls, eat the food, take the place of another goat, one who could be fertile and have kids every year. She will never produce kids to be sold, or to improve the flock.  A dead end.

How sentimental am I?

Can I bottle feed a goat kid for two weeks, only to take it to the vet and have it put down if it’s a hermaphrodite?

Should I?

Is it heartless, cruel to do that? Or is it sentimental and ridiculous to keep a farm animal that is non-productive, that may turn out to be overly aggressive? If she does become a full-grown goat, and then becomes aggressive, might we have to put her down then? How much worse would that be?

And then, of course, my thoughts turned to people. If the way I felt about a goat kid was affected by my thoughts about her gender status, how much worse must that be for parents who have a gender-indeterminate child? Because it happens all the time… Now there’s a sobering thought.

We tend to think that there are only two genders - male and female, and that everyone fits neatly into one category or the other.

But in  fact, there is an entire sliding and confusing continuum of gender, complicated by the factors of genital structure, hormonal make-up and personal gender identification. And interestingly, it is only the issue of gender identification that cannot be changed. A good surgeon can give you new genitals, and injections can provide the hormones. But if you feel like a woman on the inside, (even if you’re shaped like a man on the outside) nothing in the world will shift that feeling. Not electro-shock, or therapy, or drugs. The easiest thing, it seems, is to shift the outside of your body to match the way you feel.

Complicated, for a human.

And also for the owner of a possibly hermaphroditic goat…

Rich had a day off today, and we sat at the breakfast table, eyeing the spitting sky and trying to decide what to do. There are a lot of things on the list - we need to sort out the old chicken run, so that the chickens can be shifted there when we start re-doing the barn next week. Taid had the idea that we could catch and wing clip our free range bandits, and stick them all in the chicken run, so that the newly re-roofed barn would be blissfully free of random chicken poo - but first the chicken run needs its fence fixing, and a new roof on the chicken house.

And we need to muck out the stall where Dexter died.

But the first priority seemed to be the laburnum trees that we suspect of poisoning Dexter. We have never had a problem before - but with our luck, as Rich pointed out, another goat would eat one next week, and we would remember the time that we sat inside, thinking about getting rid of the tree but putting it off one day too many…

So we spent the morning in the pouring rain, hacking up and getting rid of the laburnum. At times it rained so hard that we couldn’t see, so we would retreat into the top shed, hair plastered to head, (well, mine, anyway! sorry, Rich…) mopping our foreheads and staring out the open door at the sheets of water.During the breaks in the storm Rich chain-sawed up the trunks and big branches, while I took the loppers to the smaller ones. Afterwards I swept up the leftover leaves and seedpods as carefully as shards of glass, getting down on my knees to get rid of each scrap of green…

Glenda the good (our Saanen star milk goat) is still on milk withdrawal from the penicillin she had for the abscess on her udder. The abscess has cleared up brilliantly, but we’re still waiting to get our milk back. In the meantime, we’ve been milking Nessa, Toffee’s mother. (Toffee was born July 1.)

And I have to say, although I adore goats in general, Nessa is one that tests the boundaries of my affection. She is - not to put too fine a point on it - ugly, mean, nasty-tempered, horned like a devil and gammy-legged as an old sailor, with teats that stick out sideways. She kicks when you try to milk her, jumps fences when you put her out, and just generally behaves like a walking, bleating blister.

Yesterday I went out to do the morning barn chores with fear in my heart. I past the empty, ominous, yet-to-be-mucked out stall where Dexter died. I checked carefully that everyone was still alive - although we think it was the laburnum, it’s hard to tell - he might have had something infectious! But everyone seemed happy and hungry, leaning eagerly over the stall doors for the odd scratch behind the ear. Lola always stands up on her hind legs and leans her brisket on the door, like some dance hall floozy waiting for a whiskey at the bar…

I’ve put a radio in the barn, because I seem to spend so much time in there that I thought I might as well have some music. So I turned on the radio, collected all the food bowls from the various stalls - we have 11 goats now, in four different pens, and each pen gets its own ratio of food bowls, proper amounts of stock mix, wet or dry beet shreds, etc…very complicated. I dished out the food, gave the bowls to the right inhabitants, put Glenda’s bowl on the milking stand and let her out. She went straight up on the stand, jumped up and started eating quietly, bless her - she’s never kicked or budged in her life, even when we were milking her with a horrible great abscess in her udder. You’ve never seen such a placid animal. I used to think Saanens were boring…but I’ve changed my tune now! Rich tried to tell me about Saanens from the first, of course…he nearly always is right, it’s very annoying.

I tipped Glenda’s milk into the two bottles we use to feed Eira, let Glenda out in the field, and put Nessa’s food bowl on the stand with a sinking heart. She came out, kicking and butting, tried to escape into the field, didn’t want to get on the stand, resisted when I heaved her up, and immediately had a gigantic poo everywhere.

I started to milk her and she kicked.

I milked with the other hand and she kicked.

I tried again and she put her foot right in the bucket, complete with clod of poo.

I gave up on the jug, held her leg with one hand and started trying to milk with the other, just to make her more comfortable. (Why I bothered, I don’t know!) Her wonky sideways teat was spraying my legs with milk on every other squirt - sometimes soaking me, sometimes the floor, sometimes the wall. Then I decided to try the jug again, grabbed it, and sloshed the remaining milk in it all over my shirt.

I gave up and came inside the house, covered with milk and pieces of hay. I figured that I had about two hours before I would actually start to curdle.

I called my friend Lynn - the one I call “the goat whisperer.”

“Lynn,” I whimpered. “Help me.”

Lynn showed up about forty-five minutes later with her clean clothes in a bag, asked for a pitcher of warm water and a rag, and headed out for the barn. She came in smiling about twenty minutes later with a liter and a half of milk in the jug.

“How did you do it?” I asked her, awed.

“She needs hobbling,” Lynn said. “Just tie a scarf around her back legs in a figure-8.”

Hobbling. Sure. I knew that…..

Dexter

Dexter died.

I was just taking Benji upstairs to put him in the bath when Rich came in from the barn.

“I need you to come outside,” he said.

“But I’m just…” I looked at his face. “Now?”

“Now.”

I asked the girls to finish putting Benji to bed, and followed Rich. He grabbed his rifle on the way out - never a good sign.

We went out to the barn and I was shocked to see Dexter laying flat on the floor of his stall, panting and groaning. He was unconscious, and it was clear that he was in unbearable pain.

He had been sick that morning, off his feed - and it was a rare morning when he didn’t come charging up to get his bowl of concentrate. He was sleek and loved his food. I had gone in to look him over - we were keeping him inside most days, so that he didn’t bully the goats who didn’t have horns - and we had just had a phone call from some people who wanted him.

We couldn’t keep him, but figured as fat, sassy and affectionate as he was, he would make a great companion goat for someone. Sure enough, these people had lost a goat, and their remaining one was pining. (You can never have just one goat - they’re herd animals, need company!) They sounded perfect - knowledgeable, experienced goat keepers, with a goat already on hand. They were just trying to sort out a trailer. So we were looking forward to placing Dexter in a good home.

I phoned Rich and told him that Dexter wasn’t looking well, and that I thought he should have a jab of penicillin just in case. I wasn’t up to administering the shot, so Rich said he would do it as soon as he got home.

Which he did.

But now, just a few hours later, Dexter was obviously dying. Whatever he had, had taken him from glossy show condition to death’s door in an unbelievably short time.

His suffering was horrible to hear.

“Shoot him.” I said.

Rich went inside the stall, gently put the rifle to Dester’s head and pulled the trigger. I’ve seen this a few times now - the shot, the blossom of bright red blood, the kicking feet. It’s always been lambs that we were going to eat, or billy goat kids that we had to put down. Not a big, healthy adult animal like Dexter.

I cried, and Rich held me and patted my shoulder. Then I wiped my eyes and went to find a wheelbarrow. We loaded Dexter into it, his head lolling horribly over the side, and wheeled him up to the gate. We covered him with a tarp, and came inside where I phoned the knacker man.

I was grateful, for one brief moment, that Dexter wasn’t decomposing. The last time Rich and I handled a dead body, it was a sheep that had been dead for two days, and had turned a horrendous green and purple color, its entire head destroyed by maggots. We loaded it onto a tarp, and pulled it up to the gate with the quad bike. I vomited three times, and even Rich was faintly green. The smell lingered for days.

I guess I’ve come a long way since my days in the city when death was just a concept, and not something practical that you roll up your sleeves and deal with…

My friend Lynn reckons that it sounds like Dexter ate some laburnum. Horribly poisonous to goats, and fast-acting. We do have two laburnum trees, and I guess we’ve just been lucky so far. The trees will have to come out…

Poor Dexter.