The new princess, Conkers

Today I mucked out the goat shed.

You wouldn’t think it would be so much fun.

I didn’t do the whole shed - just one of the stalls. I”ve decided that I need to do one stall a week. Doing it that way, in strict rotation, I can clear, disinfect and re-touch the whitewash on one stall every week in about an hour, and it never turns into the heavy, heart-rending, day-long business that it becomes if I leave it six months.

It sounds like slog work, I know. Elly came home to pick up some gear for her teenage-camping-with-friends-in-a-teepee expedition, and eyed me warily. I was dressed in my waterproof green rubber trousers, plaid shirt, rubber gloves, and green wellies.

“What are you doing, Shanni bach?” she said. (Bach means little in Welsh - a term of endearment… I hope.)

“Mucking out the goat shed,” I said, raising my gloved hands.

“Living the dream, you are,” she said.

She laughed. And I laughed. But the truth is, I am…

You’d think that cleaning out a dirty stall would be the worst kind of drudgery. Punishment, at best. Dirty straw? Animal manure? Horrible, surely.

But I’m inside our newly beautiful barn, with it’s clean whitewashed walls. I’m opening wooden gates that Rich and Benji made, carefully grooved and latched. Radio 2 is playing, and I’m humming along. The air smells of the sweet, herby hay that Rich mowed and baled off our own fields - that we all helped gather into the barn. And the satisfaction is strong.

With each forkful of dirty straw that I pitch into the wheelbarrow, I’m more a part of what’s going on here. Our two beautiful new Anglo Nubian goats, Seren and Conkers, (waiting for their full lot of injections before they can wander down into the woods with the other goats) peer over their stable door, eager for a stroke, a branch of the sycamore tree to nibble, a kind word. I stop to give them a scratch and a cuddle nearly every time I pass their door, distracted by their glossy beauty and long, almond-shaped eyes.

I get a contentment that is difficult to describe from doing the barn chores. Leaving each animal fed (and milked, if necessary!) with clean staw bedding, fresh water and clean hay to eat, leaves me feeling the same way that I do at the end of the evening with the family meal behind us, the dishwasher humming and the sink shined.

The goats themselves are so luscious - lustrous-coated, long-eared, intelligent, affectionate. They lean over the doors, nuzzle, ask for a scratch behind the shoulders. The milk they give is healthful for us - Benji no longer has to be rushed to the hospital for bronchial infections. His skin is clear, free of the eczema he used to have. I can use the milk to make soap, cheese, kefir.

But more than all of this - is the link. We are linked to these animals, and they are linked to this place. We feed them, keep them clean, give them hay and water and concentrate. And they give us their milk.

Feeding on the grass that grows here, the trees that leaf here, the hay we harvest here, they are creatures of this specific location. Drinking their milk and eating the cheese that we make from that milk, we become more creatures of this place as well. Our roots are here, as surely as the trees.

The wheel of the farm turns, and we turn with it…

Joli and Benji show off their wall-building skills!

We’ve got a new barn!

After Rich and Rhys pulled down the roof on the old one, and put up new timbers (in the lashing rain, no less…) it was a family affair to build new block walls, rip out all the dirty inside stuff and limewash the pens.

The Barn Before...

The Barn After!

Rich came home from work every night and slaved away in the evening and weekends. We all went out there every time we could, and worked away. It seemed like it took absolute ages…but finally it was done!

And now, all those lovely empty stalls. Our goats only fill four of the seven. Hmmm…

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…