Goat breeding challenges

 Elizabeth Taylor

Breeding challenges? What's so challenging? They just do it, right? Well, yeah, but because we want to know who breeds whom, we have to set up the goats on dates. And because we want to know when the kids are due, we wait until the does are in heat and then put them together with the chosen one. That is much easier to do when (a) you have no physical limitations, or (b) you have children with no physical limitations who can help. I used to have both. I currently have neither!

This morning before leaving for work, Mike mentioned to me that Taylor was screaming her head off. Ah, that's who's making that racket out there. I looked out the window, and her wide-open mouth matched the sound of the screams as she stood at the gate to the barn pasture staring towards the buck pens. This should be easy, I thought, because she's a trained milk goat. She runs into the milking parlor twice a day, every day for milking. Well, obviously she was afraid that I had some terrible fate in mind for her because this turned out to be anything but easy!

I went to the pasture and opened the gate so she could come into the pasture where the buck pens are located. She eyed me suspiciously and then ran past me. To complicate matters, this pasture has been rooted up quite a bit by the yearling piglets, so there are lots of holes and little hills that make walking a challenge -- even for someone with a good pair of legs. Don't even think about running, I told myself. Patience is a virtue ... and reduces injuries. But every time I came without twenty feet of Taylor, she'd bolt! You'd have thought the doe had never been touched by human hands in her life.

I wanted to breed her to Monarch, but if I couldn't catch her, that was going to be a challenge. She visited the buck pen where AJ was hanging out with Victoria, a yearling who is being pen bred. She flagged (wagged her tail) at him, and he sniffed her and turned up his lip, meaning that he liked what he smelled. Then she trotted down to the buck pen at the other end of the pasture where Calvin and Austin were staying. She was bred to Calvin last year. I really hoped that she would not plant her feet down there and refuse to move because it was the farthest from where Monarch was staying. Finally she trotted back to AJ, and I decided that it might just be easier to go into AJ's pen and bring him out. After all, there were no other does in the barn pasture. So, I went in there, and AJ ran away from me!

"Seriously, dude? Do you want to have sex today or not? Because if you run away from me, it's not happening!" I took a few more steps towards him, and he ran away again. He is four and a half years old. This is his fifth breeding season. He really should know that when there is a girl in heat, and I come to get him, it means only one thing! "Well, never mind then," I said as I turned and left his pen. "Your loss." I really wanted to breed her to Monarch anyway, so I decided that catching Monarch and bringing him into the barn pasture might be the easiest route.

I went into the little barn where Monarch was staying with the three bottle bucks. Monarch is only six months old, which is why he is still with the baby bucks. I thought it would be easy to catch him because when I was trying to take pictures of him last week, he kept jumping on me. But of course this couldn't be easy either. He came running into the barn from the pasture when I called the boys, but as soon as I tried to catch him, he started running around the stall in a big circle. So, I got a pan of grain and a lead rope. Finally something went right! He went for the grain and didn't care that I was putting a lead around his neck.

As soon as I took him into the pasture, he and Taylor spotted each other. She came trotting over, and he ran to her. He sniffed her, she flagged, he blubbered, she stood, he mounted, she hunched her back indicating a successful mating, and that was that. Yes, it really does happen that fast. Had I blinked, I really would have missed it!

But a single mating isn't always enough, especially with a six-month-old buck whose sperm count may not be that high yet. At that point, Taylor decided to play hard to get, so she started trotting around the pasture, and Monarch tried to run after her, dragging me behind him. After about five minutes of this, she decided to stand again, so there was another successful mating. I can't do this all morning, I thought. I should be able to catch Taylor next time she stands for Monarch. So, I grabbed Taylor's collar and led them both into the barn so I could put them into a stall for the day.

 Monarch 

Leading two goats across a pasture -- one by the collar and one with a lead -- is not as easy as it sounds. Monarch is not exactly trained to lead like a dog, so he was zigzagging all over the place and ran around me, wrapping the lead around my legs. Because I had one hand on Taylor's collar, I couldn't move the lead to my other hand. I'm not sure how I got out of there uninjured, but I did eventually get them both into a stall in the barn.

Note to self: Put all of the bucks into their own individual breeding pens, and if a doe is in heat, do not let her into the pasture after the morning milking!