We have just finished a month of goat sitting, as Nanny, Lucy and Bessie's owners had to be away. It was the first January we have spent with goats, so there was quite a learning curve and I have spent a lot of time looking up goat care related web sites.
For information, the UK ones seem a bit precious and useless to me. Any site that recommends you regularly keep an eye on the body temperature of your animals with use of a rectal thermometer, and doesn't then qualify that a bit, seems odd to me. Particularly as there are a lot of people out there that keep goats as pets, and not as a breeding herd. I wonder (purely as an aside) if the goat herds of the deserts of the near and middle East keep such a thermometer with them for regular inspections....
Anyway, the girls made it very clear to us over the month that good winter goat weather is nice, sunny days and no harm if it gets a bit crisp and cold at night (even -10 degrees C is quite alright thank you). What really gets a goat's goat is wet, dank, windy weather, when your hay seems to soak up and attract ever more water and your deep litter bed in the goat shed gets a bit ripe and wet as well. Fortunately the girls have had more of the former weather recently, and welcomed their owners with a merry skip and then begged embarrassingly for food.
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