Horny

Our goats have horns.

This is a no-no in the greater goat community. The greater goat community doesn’t know squat however. They know shows, maybe, which aren’t real. Maybe they know factory-farm type production – when your billy goats start having milk; when your nanny’s udders hold so much that they easily get infections; when a mamma won’t take care of her babies; that’s overbred, ok? But that’s the kind of stuff promoted by the greater overbred goat community.

We’re homesteaders. We are subsistence farmers. We try to provide for ourselves while enhancing the fertility of the earth which in turn enhances our health and the health of the world. I identify with the goat lady on the top of the mountain in the film (and book) Cold Mountain.

And our goats have horns. In the more than a decade that we’ve had goats, none (horned or not) has ever been hurt by horns. But I’ve seen a few dogs, the single greatest danger to goats, tossed by those horned goats. The dogs didn’t come back for more. The hornless goats only ran away whereas the horned goats took care of the situation.

Horns also serve as handy handles by which to grab and control a goat. We respect the goats and don’t treat them as humans and we’ve never been hurt by horns. Not that we couldn’t be, but we could be hurt by de-horned goats too. Dehorned goats still butt, if you let them. Our goats would not consider butting us.

And baby goats don’t have horns. This paragraph is especially dedicated to the nearby farm which says if you want to reserve a baby boy goat and have him left intact horn-wise, you have to pay more so they can isolate him from the other, dehorned goats. Well, DUH, babies don’t have horns! They have swirls of hair from which their horns will grow but they will not be of any size until they are quite old, a lot older than weaning.

The baby in the photo above is more than two months old (way past weanable) and see those itsy bitsy horns? People are just so stupid sometimes it makes me want to puke. (trying to remember, everybody is warm, everybody is somebody’s baby, ohm mani padme um, hummmmmmmm)

Just to further horrify any holier-than-thou goat people who might happen by, we also castrate boys by banding. We give them a tetanus shot, carefully place the band, and that’s it. I can only imagine that people who have trouble with this method either wait too late or place the band carelessly.

Now, anybody got a decent, preferably Nubian, preferably horny, billy for sale?

Just want to add here that if someone wants their herd de-horned, I'm not judging them! That is fine as frog hair and none of my business anyway. If someone wants to wether their boy goats by cutting them or crushing them (can't think but there is a little surgical tool that literally crushes the vessels serving the testicals and they wither and get reabsorbed), then that is fine too. That is NOT what this rant was about. Just in case someone was confused.