baby goats | Surviving Mexico

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January 3, 2020 · 7:11 am

The Last of Elvis’s Love Children

The last of Elvis’s love children, a set of twin boys, have arrived. While we have other goats that are pregnant, they aren’t due for a month or so yet, so their conception was after Elvis had left the building.

All of Elvis’s kids have the longest floppy bunny ears. Several have the distinctive black stripe down their backs like dear old dad. None are the lovely dark brown of Elvis though.

While we were still celebrating Elvis’s fecundity, one of our other goats gave birth to a premature and sadly, short-lived kid. The rest shouldn’t be ready to deliver for another month or so. Since they are younger and smaller goats, we don’t expect any more twins, which is fine by me.

On other animal news, Lady is now nearly fully recovered from her hoof staking incident. She and Red even went for a short ride up the hill and back with my husband this week. Red has figured out how to open the goat pen to Jolina’s delight.

George and Terry have yet to become friends, both are extremely jealous of my son’s affections even though he tries to give equal time and attention to all three boys. Their neediness has prompted my son to declare that when he marries and has children, three are too many.

My husband had a scare with Jolina the week after Christmas. The neighbor down below had planned to serve birria when his son came to town and needed a smallish goat. He and my husband decided on which of our goats was to go. However, when the neighbor came to pick it up, my husband was working. He insisted that my husband had sold him Jolina and my son let her go.

In the morning, when my husband was feeding the goats, he noticed Jolina was missing. When my son told him, he panicked. He jumped on his moto and without even a helmet, headed to the neighbor’s house on a rescue mission. Fortunately, Jolina hadn’t been slaughtered yet and was brought back to the fold safe and sound. Whew!

Other than that, things are as quiet as they can be in our still overcrowded animal situation. Who knows what delights or tragedies 2020 has in store for our own animal kingdom?

Some of the Kids have Arrived

This year has been pretty bleak in the goat department with only one baby being born. Now that we’ve reached December and most of the herd is pregnant with Elvis’s love children, well, it’s time to rearrange living quarters to accommodate the newbies and their overprotective mamas.

The first set out of the gate were these two, a boy and a girl. One of the triplets, Jolina, the tailless, moseyed on over to investigate and got trapped in the barrica (barrel) for a few hours when mama goat wouldn’t let her close to her new babies. If you remember, Jolina lost her tail when she got overly curious about Red right after he was born. Cookie just bit it off. Apparently, Jolina hasn’t learned her lesson. Oh Jolina! When will you learn?

Mama goat’s young daughter also gave birth just minutes after. She only had one girl and my husband, Papa Chivo, was disappointed. But seeing how this is her first birth, a healthy and happy girl kid is ok in my book.

Because overcrowding is an issue, even before Terry came to live with us, the stalls had to be repurposed to lodge the new little ones. So right now, all mamas and babies are in Lady’s stall and Lady is housed in the patio with Fred and George Puppers. Since Terry and George still haven’t made peace, Terry is in the backyard.

But what about Buster Rabbit? Unfortunately, a few days before Terry came to us, someone left the ajibe door open and Buster Rabbit fell in the well. Isn’t there a fable about a rabbit and a well? Sadly, there was no happy ending for Buster in this case. So Terry took over the backyard.

Several of the other goats are so heavily laden with progeny they can hardly walk. My husband is predicting triplets, but I say just twins will be quite enough.