Behinds and Betweens: Life, Death and Dinner

Winter cold and snow continue. It's now 2009 and we're faced with making some important decisions about our farm. In this photo, Vanda wears a red goat coat, made especially to keep goats a bit warmer. In our case, we decided we might be able to increase Vanda's winter milk output if we could keep her warmer. For the most part it works, although the people who make these coats don't seem to have goats like ours. We've got these wire gates and for the goats, it's like a scratching post from heaven, they've rubbed against them so often they bow out at the bottom. This makes short work of the cute little connectors on the coat. However duct tape has found one more place to win converts and boy howdy it sure works...we just taped the coat on! But that wasn't the decision I refer to above. In the photo on the far right is Nemo, you can see he has grown to be a pretty big goat. He was still sweet, but things had changed from when he was our first born on the farm; so little and cute. Now almost 2 years on, he was eating a lot of hay and he had started realizing the power in his size. We could hear Vanda bellowing at him when he would pester her again and again, pushing her around or just wanting to play. Vanda clearly didn't think it was cute anymore and she had her two girls to raise. We now had six goats to feed. Neenia was pregnant and Vanda soon to be, if they each had two kids that would mean we'd be at 10 goats and the future was starting to look untenable. What were we going to do?