Tag Archives: Animal Husbandry

July 26, 2013 · 5:55 am

La Curandera–A fourth reading

An example of a full cleansing by a curandera. The herb brush is passed around the body with prayers for cleansing.

So nearly a year had passed since the last reading and my husband was all out of sorts about everything. He seemed to be in a deep depression. So I sent him to Chencha again. She told him that he didn’t have any motivation to do anything and that all he had been doing was sitting around the house. (true) Then she said he was fighting a lot with his family for no real reason. (true) That his wife was worried about him. (true) That animal husbandry wasn’t for him as his animals up and die. (true) And further that some female was trying to make he and I separate. (unconfirmed) When she passed the egg around him and cracked it, there was some sort of animal. Basically at this point, he was up shit creek without a paddle. So it was 9 sessions the full work up, and another reading for him.

Session 2 of 9–egg still dirty

Session 3 of 9–salty egg

And he gave up after that. It was taking too much time I suppose. He would get up at 5 am to stand in line. Numbers are given out starting at 7 am. The lower the number, the earlier you get in, but there was always a wait. Chencha now only saw people Tuesdays and Fridays. I think I mentioned before that my husband is not a patient man.

At this point, we decided to rent a local and sell tacos. He was hesitant about this but I kept insisting that it would be good. So gradually we got set up and ready to go. But before he would open, he went to see Chencha again. He only had her read the cards, no cleansing. She told him that if he rented the local for his business, it would start off slow, about 22 days of slow, but then would do well. He would have the opportunity to work for someone else (I am supposing his brother here) but that it wouldn’t be in his best interests to work for him. Something I told him as well. Anyway, she gave him a spray called Llama Clientes that he should spray around to attract clients. It smells like old lady. And she told him to buy red and white carnations to put in the business. This he did. But just like with the cleansing sessions, he gave up on the tacos too. (See Failing at your own business–Taco Express)

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disclosure

Separating the sheep from the goats

Our goat herd posing for a picture at our mini-ranch

Mini-ranching on a lot that measures a mere 7 x 20 meters requires careful animal selection. Our animals must be sheltered from the torrential downpours of the rainy season and the staggering heat during the dry. So larger animals like cows were not in the plan. Instead, we opted for goats.

There’s a quite a bit of bad hype about goats but managed properly we have found them preferable in every way to sheep. Goats eat more of a variety of the native plants that grow in La Yacata, are hardier, healthier, give more milk and complain less. They stay bunched around the female boss goat and although sometimes like to dar la vuelta (take a walk) do not startle as easily as sheep.

Finding something to eat in the rainy season is no problem at all.

Yes, they like to jump. Duchess is a champion jumper. She managed to spring off the wall and hurtle over the 5-foot fence several times a day. My husband then added another 2 feet of wire, and now she stays put.

Almanzo our rent-a-stud

Yes, the macho goats smell. And smell quite a lot during the breeding season. You see, apparently, male pee is like cologne to a female goat, and a macho goat will want to be at his best to entice the ladies, so pees on his own face in the hopes of a little romance. Male goats, if they still have their horns, also have odor areas behind the horns and in a mature male, it does reek! Most of the stud muffins we borrowed or rented for the breeding season (we don’t keep a male goat all year around) have been dehorned and deodorized, so the smell is not quite so bad. Macho goats are a bit territorial when it comes to their flock of beauties too. Once I thought I’d go in the pen to refill the water that had been accidentally spilled while Almanzo was in residence. Well, he didn’t take kindly to my intrusion into his harem, and when I turned to try and scramble out, he gave me a full head-butt on my backside and knocked me 5 feet or so to the wall. Fortunately, he was dehorned, and the only thing damaged was my pride. Nowadays, when there is a macho gigolo in residence, only my husband enters for feeding and watering.

Goats have hooves that if not worn down by walking or regular filing, grow into enormous curved claws that cripple them. The terrain in La Yacata is well suited for hoof maintenance. Our goats go out several hours a day, jump around on rocks, play king of the mountain and munch vinas (bean-like crunchy seed pods that grow on mesquite trees).

Vinas (seed pods from a mesquite tree) a goat delicacy!

For the most part, my husband’s “uncha, uncha” keeps them together. My son and I apparently do not have the same authority in our voices, and when it has been up to us to care for the herd for the afternoon, it has been a delight for the goats and a frustration for us. Just like at school when a substitute teacher is in, chaos reigns!

Goats provide milk and meat for our family, although we learned early on not to name those destined for the butcher’s knife. It is awfully hard psychologically to eat the pets! Goat destinies are determined at birth. Girl goats will be breeders, and boy goats are either sold or cooked. After a girl goat’s first successful pregnancy and delivery, we can determine if she is a keeper or to be sold. Keeper goats are those that have good milk production, have twins or are excellent caretakers. Tweedledee, for example, adopted King and Queenie (twins that we purchased shortly after their birth) AND our two little twin sheep whose mother did not have any milk, Vaquita and Torito, in addition to her own kid Princess. Unfortunately, good mothering instincts is not a hereditary trait like twinning. Princess had her first kid this year, but continued nursing from her mother refused to nurse or care for her daughter Spring and managed to find a way to drink her own milk. We sold Princess, and Tweedledee adopted her grandkid Spring.

Vaquita the sheep

My husband has tried twice now, unsuccessfully to keep sheep with our goats. Borregos (sheep) are finicky eaters, so aren’t as delighted with foraging as our goats and thus, require additional alfalfa purchases. They also prefer to eat from the ground rather than a trough but since they won’t eat food that has poop pellets in it, waste more food. Sheep startle easily and then run blindly around. One day, my husband and I left the herd with our son and went up the hill, no more than 5 minutes away, to tie the horses. When we got back, my crying son told us that the 2 new sheep had run off and now were at the bottom of a neighbor’s ajibe (dry well). Fortunately, the water was only up to their necks, but it took some doing to haul them out. And talk about bleating! Sheep carry on whether there is food in the trough or not. Once one sounds the alarm, the rest pick up the tune.

Queenie sounds the alarm when food supplies run low!

That’s not to say that goats don’t holler when dinner is late. Queenie is notorious for it! She decided it is her duty to let us know when food supplies are running low, even with a mouthful of food.

Then there is the problem of housing two machos–one goat and one sheep. Of course, each wants to be head macho and butt heads for the title. And according to my husband, a goat that has been serviced by a sheep, even though no offspring results, becomes sterile. I’m not sure if that is true but necessitates keeping the machos in a separate area and tied which then limits their completion of their husbandly duties for their own species.

Tweedledee and Tweedledum

All in all, we’ve decided that sheep are not for us. So far this year, Princess has given us Spring and Duchess (an excellent mother although without much extra milk) has provided us with Winter. And just yesterday, Queenie has presented us with Rey (King) and Royal. With grandmas TweedleDee and TweedleDum, we have a manageable herd, and once the kids are a bit older, we will have more milk that we know what to do with! For awhile, I was making homemade bread with the excess organic goat milk and organic eggs our little mini-ranch produced and had quite a little business going there. However, at this moment, our chickens are in the off-season (when they don’t lay very many eggs due to the number of hours the sun shines) and the goats all have hungry kids, which leaves us just enough milk for our morning coffee and that’s it.

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Filed under Animal Husbandry, Homesteading, Native fauna and flora

Tagged as Animal Husbandry, Food, Goat, goats, homesteading, Livestock, Milk, mini-ranching in rural Mexico, sheep

February 14, 2013 · 1:07 am

Miss Piggy didn’t bring home the bacon

Allow me to introduce Miss Piggy. The stalk with the red grain on it is called maiz sorgo.

This month, my husband is pig-sitting. Yep, that’s right. He has loaned out what was once Miss Piggy’s bungalow to someone who is building pig corrals in La Yacata. But I’m not happy about it.

First, this was to be supposedly a week or so home away from home for 3 piglets. But we are now pushing a month with our 8 piggy guests. Then management (us) was not providing the intercontinental breakfast with this service, nor the daily room cleaning. However, the owners are a bit lax with their service provisions, and the 8 little piggies are not so quiet with their protestations about a dirty room and late dinner.

And then there is the dinner itself. The owners bring the typical churros (pellet processed pig food) and then add a creative dish of raw chicken intestine. Every fly in La Yacata comes to dine. I objected strongly to this diet, but being a gringa what do I know? According to the owners, that’s the way it’s always done.

Now one of these little ladies has developed a prolapsed rectum due to diarrhea caused by this diet. It’s as awful as you might imagine, so I’m not posting any pictures of that. Even after I pointed out that they needed to provide a better quality food or the other 7 will suffer the same fate (there isn’t any cost-effective treatment and will end in her death), the response was that’s the way it’s always done.

And truth be told, it is. Last year I was all gung-ho to get a pig. We had a perfect little space in the back. Thus began the quest for Miss Piggy. We traveled hither and yon asking about at pig farms. We discovered that those who raised pigs for meat were raising sterilized animals. I didn’t want a sterilized animal, my vague piggy plan had lots of piglets in the picture. So we kept looking.

We went in search of breeders. Town after town, no luck. Some pig breeders had a litter ready to sell, but wouldn’t just sell us one. It was all 6 or none. Seems pigs were sold by weight to the bigger commercial companies that came once a week to the market. The pig breeder said he would get a better price if he had more pigs on the scale.

And the places these pigs were living. EEEWWWW! Now, I’m not exactly a city girl. We rented a house next to a pig farmer when I was a girl. But there was nothing to compare that large, open, clean-air pen with the corrals that these pigs lived in. The floors and walls were cement so that the pigs wouldn’t dig around in them. They were barely big enough for these enormous monsters to turn around in. And they were built at a slant so that their liquefied excrement would drain out of the corral and into an open drainage ditch which eventually connected to the sewer of the owner’s home. The idea was to grow the pigs as quickly and as mammothly as possible and then sell them to the carnicerias (meat markets) for carnitas (deep fried pork). So the feed these growers used was, yep, you guessed it, a combination of the pig processed feed (churros) and chicken intestine (for protein).

Eventually, we did find a pair of unsterilized piglets. I felt that one pig was enough to begin with, so we gave the little boy pig to my in-laws to take care of. Unfortunately, my mother-in-law didn’t take kindly to having another mouth to feed, and he became carnitas before he was even big enough to provide a mouthful of meat for each family member.

Waiting for the milk to go on their cereal of milled maiz sorgo.

Yummy! Couldn’t even wait til we had the milk all poured before they started in!

But we kept Miss Piggy. (You need to know that we only give names to animals that we don’t plan on eating, helps to keep the psychological effect of eating one’s pets to a minimum.) She gobbled up the mixture of milled maiz sorgo (a red grain) and goat’s milk that was her main feed. Occasionally, just for variety, there were corn bits mixed in or a dash of alfalfa or this weedy sunflower looking plant that didn’t have a flower called gelite that she just absolutely loved.

She was quite the lady, kept her bungalow as clean as a whistle. She pooped in one corner, had her water in another, ate from a third, and slept in the final corner. She pranced about and greeted us happily. When we cleaned her pen, we gave her poop to the chickens, who found all sorts of overlooked treasures. As her diet was all natural, it was ickier to clean up the dog poop than hers.

Posing for pictures!

I had some notion that we could train Miss Piggy to go out with the goats and dig to her heart’s content in the fallow fields, but once established in her bungalow, Miss Piggy had no desire to roam. She wouldn’t come out for all the coaxing in the world.

However, one day when my husband was out of town, and I was late with dinner, she managed to get out and eat all our young fruit trees down to nubs. When I got home, she was back in her pen, the only sign she had been wandering about were tiny hoof prints all about the muddy back yard and of course, no trees.

My husband kept saying she wasn’t growing as fast as she should. I suppose compared to the behemoth porkers in those fattening pens, she didn’t grow as big or as fast. But she didn’t smell, she didn’t have an excess fly infestation, she didn’t have any health problems and I was happy with her growth.

But came the day when her cost outweighed her benefits, and she had to be sold. An Amish leprechaun with a silver hoop earring came one day to take her to market. And that was that.

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