Rural Life

Goat friendly weather

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.

The disappearing rabbit

On one side, we have lovely neighbours who have been in the village forever, but on the other side, we get a new set of neighbours every year, normally in late April/early May, after the previous lot have been evicted for non-payment of rent due to the disgusting state of the house.  It is a real peasant dwelling - at the back there are no windows and the house is half buried in the garden.  In summer it is a picture of quaintness, in the winter it is a festering hole with rising damp, falling damp, condensation and just a couple of convector heaters to keep you warm.  Naturally with something built directly onto the earth, there is no damp proof course.

The current neighbour, J, is nice enough, but a bit scary looking and with some strange friends.  Last Sunday, one of them brought J a large rabbit that they had trapped, but he was out.  Could we look after it for him?  No, the cats would go mad - the thought of Poirot clamped to it for the next week while she tried to eat it all didn't bear thinking about!!  But we did say he could leave the rabbit on our cellar steps until J got home, and while we went out for a walk.

We got home again three quarters of an hour later, and J was back and the rabbit was gone so we thought no more about it until Wednesday, when P, one of J's strange friends popped in to see us about something.  At the end of the conversation, he got a bit embarrassed and asked about the rabbit.  We said we thought J had taken it when he got in.  No, J hadn't, and didn't like to ask us himself - perhaps a passing stranger had made off with it.  We didn't think that likely, we don't get passing strangers in our courtyard, apart from J and his strange friends like P!!

As a last resort, we said maybe it had been moved into the cellar, so John dragged P down into the cellar with him to look.  Behind the hot water cylinder were the head, paws and spine of the rabbit - everything else had been eaten by a cat or two.  We knew it wasn't our two, as they still don't go out, so J's two cats were in the frame.

So never underestimate what a cat will walk off with!!

Goodbye Battery Hens?

Normally I am pretty introspective here about stuff, but there was a report today on the BBC website about a planned end to battery farmed eggs by 2012 - YES!

Sadly a lot of the report was about how this would be impossible to implement, but for once something being right rather than economically easy seems to be winning the day.

In a battery egg unit, a chicken has about the space of an A4 sheet of paper living space if she is lucky - look at a piece of A4 paper then look at the photo of one of my sets of hens.  They do have a size roughly equivalent to an A4 piece of paper - so how do they move, find food, preen and so forth?  Actually my girls, although designed for a battery unit, were raised in a much larger space (in excess of Soil Association regulations) so they did actually get rather bigger than an A4 piece of paper.

I could add some fairly disgusting detail about the problems of the hybrid race that populates the battery houses, but I won't though I have hinted about it earlier.

Of course, eggs are just one product of battery systems - boycott battery eggs, but also battery chickens raised for food (Ross Cobb and Sunvalley Hybrid breeds in particular), and then the most difficult step of all, if you have cats, particularly elderly cats, chicken and rice cat food.  Well what do you think happens to the battery egg hens after a year?

It's cold!!

Over the past few days here, the temperatures have plummeted.  Yesterday we didn't get a positive temperature until after 2pm and the high was 0.9 degrees Centigrade.  Now I know that isn't much when you compare it with what they are having to put up with in Quebec, but it is more than cold enough for me.  Especially as the goats need looking after.

These are not our goats - they are adoptive goats that we look after when their owners have to go away.  Bessie and Lucy are about 10 months old and Nanny is nearly 2 (Lucy is her kid).  They are dwarf goats and their duty in life is to keep the grass down in their meadow, but they much prefer acorns, oak leaves, brambles, trees and maize to boring old grass.

In this cold snap, they are doing fine - there are still loads of acorns around, plus they have a bale of hay to nibble on if required, loads of grass still and we pop in (theoretically) every three or four days to give them some extra feed and make sure nothing is bothering them or that they haven't trashed anything.  Currently we are having to go over more frequently to ensure they have unfrozen water.  Their bowl doesn't defrost during the day, and their stream has now frozen over as well.

They are extremely podgy and have very thick coats, so they aren't suffering, whatever the goat care mafia might say.  It is just the need to keep fresh water available that causes the worry.  Below are pictures of all three during the summer.

Spaying kittens

It had to be done, with two girl cats in the house, we couldn't face the unwanted suitors or the possibility of kittens, so once they were past their suspected 6 month birthday and we had mentally girded ourselves, we booked them in.

Spay day was Tuesday 6th November.  They had been up playing most of the night, so we were tired, but they went into their cat carriers without any problems.  It is a quick drive to the vet's and then we left them, with me being rather weepy to leave them there.

Six o'clock in the evening we collected them and were given our instructions on after care.  We were also given two packs of special neutered female cat food - aren't those medical reps lovely people?  When released into the calm of the bedroom, they were as wobbly as new born lambs, so we left them in peace with a pile of jumpers to snuggle into.

Maigret has been quite clingy since the operation but is  bouncing around quite happily, and while she looked frighteningly thin when she came home, has filled out again a bit as she has re-hydrated (she is slim by nature it seems).  Poor pudgy Poirot has had a much more difficult time, and has gone off men completely.  She is starting to be interested in play again, but anything out of the ordinary and she dives back under the nearest bed or curtain.

We know it is for the best, but for the moment, it is hard, and their shaved tummies are a constant reminder of what we have put them through.  However below is a reminder of them in their entire and unshaved state!

The right kind of chickens

With our aspirations to self-sufficiency and high quality foods, we have shared our garden with chickens for the last 3 years.  The first lot we had, we nurtured up through the summer and then as the clocks went back, dispatched, plucked, jointed and ate them.  They had a good life, and a clean death and we knew where our food had come from.

The second lot we hung on to for two years, and they have had a good life, and when the clocks go back, they will have a quick, clean death.  I know that we have done our best by them (warm feeds when there have been frosts, a good mix of layers ration and treats, ample slugs and worms), so I feel no guilt.

The problem is their breed - each time we have gone for the beige jobs - see below.  These are bred we understand to populate the battery houses of Europe, and are incredibly efficient at producing an egg a day for a year.  There is precious little meat on them, even with trying to fatten them up, and after a year they show their age, so that now our remaining two are grumpy old ladies.  It is totally driven by their breeding, which seems rather unfair to us.

When we restock next year, we will not be getting "beige jobs", we will have something a bit more refined.  They won't produce so many eggs - we know that - but they will keep going longer and will have a bit of meat on them if we get peckish!

Goodbye fleas?

After 4 flea free days, this may be a bit premature, but I think we have the flea issue sorted.  The mix of Program, an aerosol spray (yes, evil things but in this one case I am a fan) of furniture protector and a new and highly powerful vacuum cleaner (thanks for the advice, Cicely) have combined to help us win the battle.

As the vet said, it shouldn't be rocket science, but somehow I feel he has a cleaner and a wife to sort these things out for him!!  It mightn't be rocket science, but it is hard work.

Anyway, Maigret and Poirot would like to demonstrate their flea free status in a wider arena - see below!