Rheema Departs Again
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.
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Tags: familiarization, houdini, management, paddocks, troughs