Showing posts with label breeding. Show all posts
Showing posts with label breeding. Show all posts

Tuesday, November 3, 2009

For the Milk

As anyone who spends time around me knows, I love talking about my animals. It's great to share my experiences with other urban-dwellers. Even if they're not at all interested in keeping animals themselves, it helps to redefine what's possible in a city backyard.

It's also fun because it helps to shed a little light on food and biology, and how they're intertwined. People ask about my plans for my goats and whether I'm milking them. I always explain that they're just now getting old enough to breed, so once they've had their babies then I can milk them for a time. And then - for almost everyone I talk to - there's a moment of realization. "Oh, I didn't realize you had to breed them in order to get milk!" Most of us city folk (myself included) grew up thinking that cows and goats were just automatically milk-able. Nope, they're mammals, and they have to follow the same biological rules that humans do.

So, today's a big day for our little farm, because I'm taking Dasha up to the breeder's to - hopefully! - get knocked up. We're breeding her to a (again, hopefully) nice, registered goat named Pirate.



Isn't he a handsome devil? We're happy that we're able to breed her to a blue-eyed buck. I really couldn't care less about the eye color of my goats. However, it's really important to me that I'm able to sell the babies, and a reality of the goat world is that the blue-eyed trait is less common, and therefore sought after.