While trying to minimize the morning chore list in preparation for my "maternity leave", I posted our sweet matriarchal goat, Annabelle, on Craig's List hoping to trade her for an intact male where we could begin the breeding cycle again. I had already begun drying her off- not much to it as she was only giving about 5 ounces a day. I quickly (much more quickly than I expected!) got a great response. Yesterday we bid farewell to Annabelle (little sad, but with both her babies gone, she had nothing left to keep her here) and welcomed "Copper". Annabelle will be given a great retirement. She'll probably have a few more rounds of kids, but without the expectation to produce milk for human consumption as well. She'll just get to be a sweet old goat mama. Copper, meanwhile, is a wonderfully tame, 3 year old male. He's got beautiful coloring and blue eyes (meaning we'll probably have some more blue-eyed babies which sell for a higher price). He's registered even. The lady who traded him clearly got the short end of the deal, but she said things just aren't selling like they used to and she's tired of fixing the fencing between Copper and her other breeding bucks. We win. So now he's here and putting the moves on Noel. They have one paddock to themselves while Noel's mother and daughter are sharing the other paddock. The front enclosure is still down due to the snake issue. We hope to stagger the pregnancies and thus the lactations so we don't have down times with no milk at all, but if the dividing fence doesn't hold, we may just have all 3 kidding at once again.
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