Our twin bucklings are about five weeks old now and they are very healthy young goats. The scabs on their head is from the disbudding procedure described earlier on this blog here.
We do not want to have bucks. Bucks are nice if you want to start a herd, but we would like to keep our goat herd small. Plus, as suggested by the picture to the right, Bucks have some goat characteristics that we prefer to avoid. The picture shows a buck peeing on his own face. The upper lip is protruding so he can maximize the taste and smell the goat urine. The propensity to pee on one's own face, is probably one of the least offensive qualities of a buck.
We would like at least one or two more does, but God did not give us any this year. We are blessed with our bucklings, who we have named Johnny Bench (yellow collar) and Garcia (red collar). (I tell them apart because Johnny Bench has coloring on his forelegs that looks like shin guards.)
The video above was shot on Saturday, May 11, 2013, the day after we undertook the neutering procedure. Neutered goats are called "whethers."
We opted to emasculate our goats with a burdizzo. FIASCO farm has a detailed description on how to undertake neutering male goats with a burdizzo here. We used a Richey Nipper tool (see left).
As recommended, we gave the young goats a tincture called Ow-Eezz to prepare them before we undertook the process. The process itself did not take long, only about five minutes per goat. The young goats were pretty sore for about two hours afterwards. The next morning, they were up and jumping around as normal. As you can tell if you watch the video, they are forgiving creatures.
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