Over the following months, I gradually got the 2 strangers more and more used to me. I’d had the males taken care of, and as the weather tuned into winter, I began letting the does down to the shed on bad nights. At first, the 2 strangers wouldn’t come in there with me, so I’d open the gates and leave them to follow the others after I’d gone.
One big question loomed in my mind – how was I ever going to drench these 2 mad mavericks? Tamer they might be – but still not tame enough to grab their faces and push a syringe into their mouths, thats for sure! Well believe it or not, it did happen eventually – just by taking things in stages.
Once I get them a bit more used to being around the big shed with me there, I began opening the pen doors and putting feed out in the troughs on the back wall. Before long they got used to me splitting them between 2 small pens and once they were feeding in the troughs there, I could shut the pen doors and get up close as they ate.
One day after a spell of familiarization with that, I decided the time had come, so I laid out my drench and syringe and without too much of a drama I managed to drench every one of them while they were eating their food. And that’s a process I can now repeat when I need to. It’s amazing what food, patience and the time to acclimatize will do in managing stock.
Then Rheema disappeared again. I found the gap under fence into the shed paddock where she’d got through – a gap, incidentally, made by the pigs, opportunistic lot.
How she managed to get right off the property altogether, I still don’t know, and I’m only grateful that her kids didn’t go with her. Like Moz, she was a Houdini. She had become so used to living on the outside, and the living is so good, that she just waited her chance and took it. I knew that with no bucks left on my place, she was unlikely to come home again. Fortunately, there are none up there either, now, so I don’t have to worry about goats reproducing themselves in the bush.
Technorati Tags:
cartoons, digital photography, small farming, lifestyle, animals, pigs, chickens, poultry, goats, humor, adventure
The other hilarious episode – though it didn’t feel hilarious at the time – happened on the first night Natasha was here with her piggies. I had spent a great deal of time beforehand trying to ensure the piglets would not be able to get to Boris’s adjacent pen or anywhere else where they might come to harm. They were about 8 weeks old.
I should perhaps go back to the day when Boris first arrived.
