It’s suddenly fall here. It’s dark out when I go next door to my cousin’s house. It’s in the 40s every morning when we milk the goats and let the chickens out. The angle of the sun is different than it has been.
The work day starts here with opening the chicken coops. The old flock always grumbles, they’re still on their perches when we open their door, and they're slow to leave their coop. The new flock - the ones we got in the mail this summer - are off their perches. They're peeping, crowding the door, and running out into the yard as soon as they can. We fill their feeder with grain and it’s time to move on to milking.
We’re drying Lulou up so that she can be bred again. When Lulou is dry, we will be milking only one goat: Mothra. Mothra had so much trouble kidding this spring that Jan decided it was too dangerous to breed her again. She’s just too narrow. Luckily, Mothra likes being milked. (Below: Lulou)
Lulou is over being milked. She doesn’t want to be bothered any more. We’re milking her every other day right now, and soon we’ll milk her every third day, and then one day we’ll just stop. Mothra, on the other hand, will continue to be milked as long as possible. I hope she keeps giving milk for years and years.
When we were milking five goats, we were using the milking machine. With one goat, it’s not worth hauling the machine out and cleaning it afterwards. So, we’re milking Mothra by hand. I think she likes that, because it’s slower, which means she gets more grain to eat. Refilling her grain bowl keeps her holding still on the milking stand. (Below: Mothra. Notice her lovely beard. It's a goatee!)
After the milking is finished, we take hay to all the goats on the farm. It’s at this point that we check in with Sam. You remember Sam, we brought him two does to breed last week. For the first couple days that pen was in turmoil. Sam was chasing those girls around the pen, and he was chasing his wether away from the the girls.
But now, my cousin thinks the does are bred. Peace reigns in their pen. The girls seem happy to be near Sam. Sam seems possessive of the girls. Wendell the wether just wants animal crackers. Which is always what Wendell wants. (Below: Sam, Carlotta, and Casey, with Wendell kind of hanging back behind the group, and Clark in the foreground).
That wraps up the morning chores. The next round of chores begins in the afternoon with cleaning the chicken coops and collecting the eggs. When I walk into the chicken yard with the bucket of scratch all the chickens come running from the far pasture. It’s really funny, watching them all run to get their scratch.
Their scratch is a combination of feed that we buy at the feed store, goat milk cheese that Jan makes from our goats’ milk, and vegetable scraps.
When all the chickens have come in for their scratch, I close the gate that leads to the far pasture, so that they’re near their coops at the end of the day (we shut them into their coops at sunset so that the skunks won't kill them).
Last week, I couldn’t close the gate because Big Red was still out in the pasture. She wouldn’t come in. Finally, I walked out to where she was to shoo her in, and it seemed there was something wrong with her legs. They wouldn’t hold her up. She scooted back to the coop yard using her wings, kind of bouncing along on her tummy.
Then she dragged herself into the chicken coop, and flapped herself into the most inaccessible nesting box in the coop. That’s the coop where the chickens go to die. Big Red is eight years old. That's really old for a chicken. She probably isn’t even laying eggs any more, she’s just enjoying life.
For a couple of days, every time we went to the coop, we checked to see if she was dead. But, every time we checked, she squawked at us. Finally, we decided we’d better start putting food and water in the nesting box next to her.
This morning, we saw her standing up! She wasn’t able to do that a week ago. Now we’re wondering if she got injured somehow, and she’s making a recovery. Who knows? She is a tenacious chicken, that’s for sure.
I’m attending a Literary Festival (via Zoom) this week, so I want to end with something about words. The suggestion of the following phrase comes from my dear friend, Norm.
The origin of “get one’s goat” is highly contested at the moment. The expression has been cited as early as 1906, and many people want to believe it comes from horse racing, where trainers used to keep a goat with their racehorse, to calm the horse. Anyone wishing to unnerve a horse simply stole the goat - just before the big race. But, linguists believe that, if the expression truly comes from horse racing, we should see examples of the phrase in accounts of races, and we don’t.
Where we do see examples of the phrase is in early reports of boxing matches.
Goats have been kept as mascots by stables, sports teams, and fraternal organizations. But, the most long-running keepers of goat mascots have been oceangoing vessels.
We have records of goats living aboard ships since the 1700s, and anecdotal evidence of them living on Roman galleys. Kept partly for their milk, and partly as pets, this maritime tradition extended into our modern U.S. Navy. A goat has been the mascot of the U.S. Naval Academy since at least 1893. Also, the Navy has had, for years, a strong tradition of boxing.
This is why many linguists believe that the phrase comes to us from Naval boxing.
But, the gist of the phrase is the same. Whether kept by horse trainers in order to calm the race horse, or by a ship to raise morale, when someone makes off with your beloved goat, you’re not going to perform as well as you should.
All I know is, in 1908, someone copyrighted the song, “Somebody’s Got My Goat.” Now, there’s a song I’d like to learn.
