Staring at Goats, Again

I’m back to staring at goats.

I pour muesli into their feed buckets and stand back to watch them eat. Cinnamon is definitely getting wider, rounder. I run my hand down her side. She doesn’t particularly like it and steps away. I follow her, keeping my hand on her. Gently. Training her to accept my touch. Her winter coat is thick, but beneath that, there is definitely more Cinnamon. She could be pregnant. I turn my attention to Sesame. She is also fatter and has changed shape slightly. Her belly now hangs lower. Almost pendulously. She could also be pregnant. Then I look at Ashcroft. He too has a round belly that has grown significantly in the past month or so. He is certainly not pregnant! Ashcroft is a wether - a castrated male. His role in this little herd is for purely cosmetic and entertainment reasons. As in he’s cute and funny. But the girls are a different story. I want them for milking. (Although they are also cute and funny.)

When I got Sesame last year, she was in milk, having given birth to twins before I bought her. Her breeders kept the kids. I milked Sesame for a few months, then dried her off earlier this year. Cinnamon is younger and has never had kids.

I don’t have a buck, so to breed from Cinnamon and Sesame, I needed to find a buck to sire the kids. My goats are pedigree Toggenburgs, and I want their kids to be the same. I found a well-bred Toggenburg buck called V about an hour’s drive away and arranged for the girls to visit at a suitable time.

Goats cycle every three weeks and are only fertile for a short time in each cycle. That means ‘a suitable time’ to take Cinnamon and Sesame on their romantic adventures would be determined by when they were in heat. So I spent time staring at goats.

I was looking for behaviour changes. Goats in heat are frisky. They make more noise. They push other goats around and try to mount them, or let the others mount them. But just to make things tricky, different goats behave differently when they are on heat and sometimes they have silent heats, where there are virtually no outward signs of change. Hence, me staring at goats.

One day, Cinnamon stood at the fence looking towards the house and bleated piteously. For hours. If I went into the paddock she rubbed against me. She pushed the other two around. Sesame and Ashcroft sniffed at her rear end. She mounted them. Ashcroft mounted her. She was in heat. Definitely. I rang Mike, the buck’s owner, and made a date to bring Cinnamon to visit V in three weeks’ time, which by my calculations would coincide with her next heat.

The following week, Sesame came into heat. She was obvious about it - piteous bleating, tail wagging, head butting. So now I knew they were cycling a week apart. It would be two separate visits to V.

On the appointed day, Cinnamon and I made the trip. We arrived and I led her across to V’s paddock. They greeted each other and … Nothing. Absolutely nothing. I figured they were just getting to know each other. This was a first date, after all. V’s owner, Mike, wasn’t convinced. “Hmmm. This doesn’t look promising,” he said. I thought he was being a little hasty in his assessment. Mike and I went and had a cup of tea, keeping an eye on the paddock as we did so. Nothing happened. V and Cinnamon were not remotely interested in each other. Not in that way at least.

I decided to leave Cinnamon there to see if the presence of the handsome V encouraged her to come into heat. Mike messaged me that night saying there was no action. Again the next day. And the next. I kept thinking he couldn’t possibly be watching the goats all the time so something might have happened without him knowing.

The following week, Sesame showed all the signs of being in heat so I rushed her to V’s for her romantic rendezvous. I had barely unclipped her lead when V raced over and sniffed her. His lip curled. She lifted her tail. No joke, less than two minutes after she got to the paddock, the deed was done. And again a few minutes later. And then again and …“This is how it usually happens,” Mike said. Now I understood how he was so certain the relationship between Cinnamon and V had been purely platonic. Cinnamon meanwhile was standing in the corner of the paddock wondering what the hell was going on. Mike and I left them to it, literally.

An hour later, I led an exhausted Sesame to the float to take her home. Cinnamon was less keen on leaving, but I figured I was going to have to spend more time staring at her to work out when she came in heat.

A little under two weeks later, Cinnamon was bleating loudly and acting pushy. I rushed her off to see V. It was 19 days after I’d first carted her off to meet V. This time, things proceeded exactly as they had when I’d taken Sesame. There was nothing platonic about the relationship. They both only had one thing on their minds.

Again, Mike and I left them to it for a while. Then I clipped the lead back on Cinnamon and she happily trotted to the trailer.

All of that happened over three months ago. A goat gestation is around five months. If they both conceived - and it seems fairly likely they would have - Sesame is due to kid on 14 November and Cinnamon on 28 November. Less than two months away. They’re both well past the half way mark of their pregnancies. If they are pregnant. If. I still don’t know for certain. Neither has shown obvious signs of being pregnant. But neither have they shown obvious signs of coming back into heat. Then again, I was initially inaccurate in predicting Cinnamon’s heat, so I could easily have missed it again. And sometimes dairy goats don’t cycle in the middle of winter. So who knows!

Sometime in the next month or so it must become apparent that they either are or are not pregnant. At this point, I honestly can’t tell. I guess I’ll keep staring at them.

Inside

I am in the early stages of a new writing project. The ‘early stages’ seem to be taking a long time, partly because it is a significant departure from anything I’ve written previously. Enough said for now! This has contributed to it being a quiet year for me book events around What’s for Dinner?. But I’m happy to say that I have one coming up on 23 October (5.30-6.30pm) at the City of Vincent library. If you are around, come and say hello!

See you outside (or inside at the City of Vincent library!),

Jill