Getting their goat

So I went down to the vet the other day to get advice on what shots to give my girls prior to breeding them for the first time and to hopefully get a lead on a buck to borrow. The pre-breeding advice took all of five minutes. As for the lead on a buck--man, you'd think it would be easy to find a buck, especially since we don't need champion lines.

But maybe it's not so surprising. The thing about bucks is that when they go into rut, they pee on their forelegs and faces to smell sexy for the gals, and apparently this drives the female goats into a sexual frenzy. It drives humans into a frenzy too, but not the same kind. More of the OMG what is that smell?!! kind. They also tend to be more adamant about getting out of fences to wander about hoping to find even more females than the ones that are in the immediate vicinity whether they've bred them all or not. I knew this, hence our not having any unaltered males of our very own, and yet breeding happens around here. It must. We're coming up on October sooner than we'll be ready for it--is there no one willing to pimp out their billy?

It's tempting to drive around the neighborhood and knock on the doors of people with male Boer goats out in their pasture. (There's no mistaking the boys even if they aren't in rut--those balls look like they belong on an Angus bull rather than a goat.) "Hey, I like the balls on your goat. Mind if I borrow him for about a month? I have cold, hard cash for the priviledge of being around his magnificent stench for the duration."

Such is life on the little farm. Sometimes it's hard to get someone's goat.