Sally

Sally was a totally different goat than Sadie had been.  She was an Alpine, so she looked different.  She was also bossy, demanding, and loud; and she definitely did not settle in easily.  The problem was made much worse by the fact that we needed her milk for our orphans, so we had to separate her from her own kids.   She spent her whole day, if we weren't actually out at the goat pen, standing staring at the house waiting for us to emerge.  Then she would start calling us and not stop until we went over and chased her back into her house.

This went on all summer until we were nearly demented.  I would creep out of the house in slow motion, boots in hand, hoping to avoid catching her attention with a quick movement or a sound.  I'd continue in slow motion until I got out of her sight, then be able to work in the garden in peace for a while.

The reason we put up with Sally (beside the fact that we felt sorry for her) was that she gave gwo gallons of beautiful milk every day.  I've never since had such a generous goat.  We had enough milk to feed all five kids.  Feeding those kids was practically the only thing we did that summer. or at least it felt that way.  We took our duties very seriously, feeding them six times a day to start with.  Between heating the milk, measuring it out, feeding the little ones, then washing and sterilizing the bottles, the process took a lot of time.  The kids thrived, though.

We had decided to keep Sadies's doe kid, who we named Lyla.  Her brother, a Little Black Goat, gradually won our hearts, too.  By the time that we admitted that we loved him so much that we just had to keep him, that name had stuck, and he was known for the next twelve years as Little Black Goat.  The other three kids were butchered for our winter's meat supply.  After they were gone, Sally could live together with the kids and she finally shut up.

That was the only time we've ever totally separated mother and kid.

Little Black Goat affection