Learning as we go..

We’re learning as we go. Keeping a small hobby farm isn’t exactly a money saving venture. You have to exercise common sense or you will quickly go broke doing it by the book, o.k., we will go broke. Costs add up so quickly it can make your head spin, so we had to come to terms at the beginning how much we were willing to spend on these silly animals. Problems come up, emotions come into play, society pressures you into “doing everything possible” even if that means debt. Before long, you’ve dropped several hundred dollars to save an animal’s life that might have been better to just let go.
The larger the animal, the bigger the vet bills, with the exception of dogs. Vet bills are out of this world with dogs because people are quicker to launch a lawsuit over the “family member”. For instance, an after hours C-sec on my 170lb goat is $500 and for my 9lb dog it is $1400. Right Dee? :) I still don’t understand that one. 
I’ve learned there is much we can learn ourselves in animal husbandry instead of paying out the bucks to “professionals”. Vaccines, treating and doing fecal exams for a variety of parasites, injections, grooming, wound care, general health care, animal midwifery(what else do I call it?)

I love the fact there is always something new to learn through some new dilemma that arises. Which is why I post. We learned a new skill this week! Disbudding goat kids. Simple as it sounds, it scared me to think of burning the horn buds off my sweet innocent little kids. Two years ago I took our first two kids to the vet. The only option was a “pain-free disbudding” <sigh>  for crying out loud… And this in a farming community.

So $125 later we had disbudded goatlings that suffered through several painful injections of lidocaine near the horn buds and seemed to be pretty doggone uncomfortable during the *pain-less* burning procedure.
This year Paul took it on. I shaved their little heads and he read a dozen articles online and watched several how-to videos over the course of a few days. He and Jacob pulled it off non-eventfully. All went MUCH better than it did at Kulshan Vet, and with little drama. As soon as they were done, I had their bottle of warm milk waiting and that is all they needed before they scampered off to play. Yay! One more skill and one less yearly bill!

One week old, triple in size, barely covered with white fur and starting to get cuter!

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I made a wonderful healing balm to use on my goat kids heads after disbudding. I will be sharing some of my favorite "homemade" recipes this next week, starting with the balm. All simple, cheap and fun to make!