What to Do with Goat Kids?

Icy wind blew constantly. I spent the day inside cleaning up the toy minutia that accumulates on our dressers; Phil spent the day inside the work/storage trailer cleaning up the paper minutia.

Phil has plenty of work-for-pay right now, but as I walked around the farmstead, I noticed little things he’d done outside, too. He’d used pallets to prop up the lambing jug, as the sheet metal roof warped down with all our snow. (It’s soon to be kidding jug—Annabelle the goat is due any day; I think her bag is filling up). He’d also chipped away at the frozen ice and mud so that the door to the barn closes again.

At about 5pm, our power went out, again. My spirits plummeted. Cold, dark, again. Phil, on the other hand, rejoiced: it’s so peaceful! It’s like the first few months we lived here (back before we needed supplemental heat, of course). This time it lasted only four hours, thankfully.

I spent some time reading up on milk goat kidding. It sounds similar to lambing, but there is the issue of milk management. I was surprised to read in one book

Many people who don’t want to bother raising buck kids for meat euthanize them at birth. (The easiest way is to drown them in a bucket of water.)

That was a new thought. I’ve assumed we would raise the kids for meat. But to off the kids before we pay to feed them, to take all the milk for our own consumption—that was a new thought.

Phil shot it down quickly. It’s one thing to kill an adult animal with a .22 to the head. It’s another to manually kill a baby of any domestic animal. So, since I don’t see myself drowning a kid, and Phil isn’t going to, I suppose we will keep whatever offspring we can, at least for a few months.