Cinnamon

I figured that is is time to share the faces of Swede Farm. (While the camera is within easy reach!) I hope to do profiles every other day or so. They deserve it. They also threatened to pull down the curtain and show who is really running things behind the scenes!

This is Cinnamon. To be exact, Soldier-Mtn PVLM Cinnamon Bay. To be precise, Cinn. She is the only goat that I have ever seen that came into the world with a built-in milk moustache.




Cinn is a hoot. She came to our farm almost exactly a year ago from Soldier Mountain Alpines up in Idaho. The breeder, Tracy Stampke, raises incredible Alpines, they do beautifully in the show ring as well as in the dairy. I was so glad to get the chance to actually drive up and meet Tracy after "knowing" her online for a few years. I wish it is a trip I could make yearly, not just to get some goats (they are addictive) but also to get to pick her brain and see her beautiful family. (Liberty wishes we lived next door, as she and Tracy's daughter Nicole and she hit it off like long-lost twins separated at birth!)

Anyway Cinn had a rough kidding this year and never really came into milk. After getting her through that rough patch I felt it best to say "fine, you want a year off, you get a year off". I felt it best to say that because Cinn calls the shots around here. She is a crazy goat with a knack for getting into trouble. In December one of the girls (one of our daughters, not one of the goats) left the gate open to the alleyway that leads to the milkroom. Cinnamon discovered this and apparently meandered down the alleyway to the milkroom door which was, as always, closed. Never one to take a challenge laying down, Cinnamon set to work figuring out how to use her mouth to open the round doorknob (picture a doorknob on a bedroom door) and let herself in. Of course she brought some of her buddies with her. She was discovered along with a gang of six other goats happily eating their dinner early. And their breakfast for the next day, apparently.

Despite their reputation for having iron stomachs, goats actually have a pretty delicate digestive system and too much of anything new--especially grains--can cause some pretty serious problems. When we want to tweak their diet we have to do so very gradually and carefully or else they can develop a situation where the contents of the stomach basically start to ferment, leading to a large build-up of gas. Infection can set in and they can die a very painful death, very quickly. The proper term is "Enterotoxemia" The slang term is "bloat". Having a feedroom full of goodies is not exactly gradual. Although we knew exactly how much food was in the room, and it was only eight pounds of their grain and one pound of animal crackers, that was enough to set off alarm bells. We had no way of knowing whether the goats discovered were the first goats in the room, or whether they were just cleaning up left overs. We didn't know if one goat--Cinnamon--had eaten everything or if they had shared evenly. We had no choice but to aggressively and immediately treat each goat in the pen that had access to the alleyway as if they had eaten all of it.

It made for a long and messy night. I'll spare you the gruesome details, but treatment includes antihistamine, injections of an antitoxin, antibiotics and voluminous amounts of oil tubed down their throats. Most of the goats seemed perfectly healthy, just ticked at us for putting them through this torment, fighting us terribly during treatment, for which I do not blame them. One of them though, a white LaMancha named Cream, eagerly guzzled the oil like it was the best thing she had ever had. Two of the goats already seemed to be feeling the effects of their gluttony, a LaMancha named Sonnet whose eyes were swollen shut from the histamine reaction that they can experience and Cinnamon who looked like a huge balloon. She was so filled up with air that it was like playing a drum when we tapped her sides to see if the treatment was helping. She blew up so much that her belly was bulging higher than her backbone as she was standing and when she laid down she was so big around that she couldn't get up.

Two things happened early the next morning. When I got up after 2 hours of sleep to run outside and check on the goats I discovered that Cream, the goat that had been so hale and hearty the night before was dying. I had enough time to run inside (25 feet away) and grab Katie and say "come quick, I think we are losing Cream" and by the time we got outside she had died. Cream was the third goat that we got, four months after we moved to the farm.

Meanwhile, Cinnamon looked like we needed to tie her to the ground to keep her from rising up in the air like a blimp. Not good. We treated her again, seeing no improvement. I paced and prayed and fretted, waiting the excruciating 45 minutes until the vet's office opened. I had the girls move the benches out of the van and load Cinnamon the Swede Farm Dirigible (we should have painted advertisements on her side) in the back and off we went. The vet repeated what I had already done, calmed my fears and said "don't worry, she'll be fine. But if she isn't improved by this afternoon, bring her back". That afternoon we trucked the incredible expanding goat back in to his office where the vet shook his head, clucked and said "well, well. That doesn't make any sense, she should have responded by now". We have come to learn this is typical for animals at Swede Farm. If it is weird, unusual, doesn't respond as it should or is very, very rare--it will come from here. I guess it is God's way of keeping me humble and from feeling like I know it all.

So he ended up shaving her side, applying a liberal amount of disinfectant, taking a large bore needle (a 22 gauge needle, for those interested in performing this at home) and piercing her side with it in a procedure called "trocharizing". From across the room we could hear the hiss of the air being released as we watched Cinn visibly deflate.

We brought Cinn home. She stayed rounder than normal for the first week, then returned to normal. She was pregnant at that time, verified by blood work. The vet felt that the pregnancy shouldn't have been impacted but we never saw signs that the pregnancy was progressing and concluded that the babies had died and become reabsorbed. Then one day, as a new goat owner was visiting to get some goat 101 technique lessons, I looked over and realized that it looked like Cinn was in labor. It was a long hard delivery, with the new-to-goats friend laying on the ground for four hours holding Cinn's head. In the end we had one hale and hearty kid, and one that had died some time before. Cinn was at risk for becoming pretty sick due to having carried the dead kid for so long so she was treated aggressively with antibiotics. She never really came into milk. Although we were disappointed by this as she had been a great milker for us when we got her last summer, we decided that at that point we were just glad that we still HAD Cinnamon and didn't push the issue.

Since that time, Cinnamon has been quiet and laid back. Some here at the farm think she has learned her lesson.

I think she is just biding her time.