I'm a Soft Touch

I'm a soft touch. There's no other way to explain it. After vowing to give the does a rest and agreeing to back off using Old Blue Eyes so much, I crumbled at the first sign of goat love. Okay, maybe it was the second sign.

For a good couple of weeks now the little bucklings, those born this year, have been becoming increasingly sexual. Snorting, grunting, and chasing any caprine with four legs--usually female, although thankfully Evelyn seems to have remained exempt--these boys are trying to be bucks. I need to finish a separate enclosure for them, but between one thing and another getting fencing jobs completed is slow. Too slow. Some automatic waterers are in and functioning now, so it's time to call back the fencing crew and to lay in a store of cattle panels so that I can create temporary fences with ease. (More on why I'm not just planning to use hot wires for that job later.)

Last year I vowed to beat the rutting season by separating the sexes before the fall. I aimed for September, but it seems that Bully got a few gals bred before I'd finished the separation process--Thumbelina, Gwen, and Jennifer. This year it isn't even officially summer yet and it has already started. The flirting by does and the bucks' application of their favorite oh-so-very-sexy cologne. If you're a goat, that is.

A couple of days back I caught Gwen mooning about alongside the fence to the boys' pasture. BullyBob was snuggled up against the fence on his side of the pasture. "You can't be serious," I said to Gwen. But she, in typical goat fashion, ignored my outburst.

Then yesterday they were mooning over one another again. In earnest. And so I, soft touch that I am, granted them a Saturday night date night. After all, Mary's hardly nursing now--if at all, and November is still warm enough to be safe for kidding. Although it would be nice to breed a line of dwarf fainters, I'm not sure that using this particular dwarf buck will be the key because Mary is tall like her dam; however, it's with that thought in mind that I granted them a date in the alpaca gals' pasture for the night.

By this morning they had stopped mooning over one another, so perhaps the urge has passed, or been satisfied, or both. This week I will sequester all of the bucks into one pasture and be done with them for a time. Then perhaps we'll hold a buckling sale. Anyone in the market for a blue-eyed Nigerian Dwarf buck of almost any color, or for a fainter buck or a fainter x Nigerian Dwarf cross buck--we're the farm for you.