Never in my life have I spent as much time on personal daily hygiene as I've spent lately grooming our pregnant goat. My goal isn't really to make her look pretty, though. Instead, I have a couple of more constructive points on my daily agenda.

The first is to keep myself occupied while Artemesia eats her morning and evening ration at a snail's pace. I realized a few weeks ago that Abigail was getting the lion's share of Artie's food (as well as all of her own) since our horned goat eats at lightning speed then bullies our smaller, hornless goat away from the rest of her dinner. So now I lock Abigail out of the goat shed while Artemesia nibbles on her alfalfa pellets and roots.

And even though it sometimes seems like a long time to wait on a busy morning, I'm actually glad Artie is a slow eater. That trait means I won't have to overfeed the doe just to keep her occupied while milking the way I did with Abigail.

So I brush our goat to keep myself from getting bored while Artie eats, right? Well, not entirely. I'm also trying to get her used to being touched all over long before the kid(s) arrive. I have a feeling that if I'd done this with Abigail, it wouldn't have been such a hassle (especially at first) to drawn down her milk.

Of course, Artemesia is much more malleable and people-oriented than her herd mate already. But even she flinched and tried to tuck her hindquarters the first few times I gently felt at her expanding udder. After a couple of weeks of personal attention, though, she's still not entirely thrilled at being felt up but she accepts it as a necessary part of eating her daily carrots.

While I'm messing around down there, I also press up gently on Artemesia's belly. About 90% of the time, Aurora (or her brother) kicks back. I have a feeling that if I was more experienced, I'd be able to guess how many kids are in there using this push test, but I can never seem to remember exactly where the last kick happened well enough to know if more than one kid is nudging its mother's insides.

If I run out of goat to brush and prod, I move on to giving our darling a pedicure. I'm very glad to see that her hooves are suddenly growing a rate more commensurate with her food intake --- a good sign that the wormer might have licked her parasite problem. The insides of her eyelids might also be getting a little pinker, but that's harder to tell since my camera tends to misread colors in closeups of Artie's dark face.

As you can tell, though, I'm not entirely teaching our first freshener good habits. Once she's done with the food in the stanchion, she moves on to licking out the bowl. Oh well --- a beloved goat needs to be at least a little bit spoiled, right?

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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.



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