Solipsism

Happy goats browsing on the back 4.

sol·ip·sism

[sol-ip-siz-uhm]  Show IPA

Noun

1. Philosophy. The theory that only the self exists, or can be proved to exist.

2. Extreme preoccupation with and indulgence of one’s feelings, desires, etc.; egoistic self-absorption

Sometimes I can be a bit solipsistic.  Not in the first sense of the word.  I don’t think I’m the only real person and all of you are figments of my imagination.  But, in the second sense – a bit.  I tend to forget that not everyone thinks the way I do or knows the same things I do or have come to the same conclusions based on the available information.  Occasionally something happens that brings this to my attention.

Yesterday we took Brie, our doe, to get blood drawn to be tested for CAE and CL.  CAE is Caprine Arthritis Encephalitis.  More information can be found here if you’re curious.  CL is Caseous Lymphadenitis.  More information about that can be found here.  Basically, they’re goat diseases and they’re not good.  Most breeders want to know that the animal you’re wanting to breed is CAE/CL negative and will provide the same information to you.  The place we took her yesterday is where we were thinking of breeding her as well.  The lady offered to do the blood draw for us and it would be less expensive than using a vet.  So, we borrowed a dog crate from a friend (we haven’t obtained one of our own yet), loaded Brie into it and drove to the other farm.  I’m glad we went, because it was an eye opening experience.

The goats seemed fairly healthy and well fed, but their area was very small.  In the same amount of space that we use to house three small goats (small as in not full grown yet), she kept more than ten goats (I didn’t get an exact count).  Several of the goats were kept in small fenced areas either by themself or with one other goat just off the main area.  They had bedding and, I’m sure, food and water, but they didn’t have room to run around.  Also, her herd management practices are very different from ours.

We try to use natural methods to preserve our goats’ health as much as possible.  If they start coughing or acting off, we give them garlic right away and that usually takes care of the problem.  If necessary we would use medications and more serious measures.  We did give them a little bit of a chemical wormer this fall because I suspected that one of the goats had lungworm.  Garlic doesn’t take care of lungworm in the same way it does for other intestinal worms.  But, they’ve otherwise been healthy without routine use of vaccinations, chemical wormers, or other medical interventions.  We also like to let our goats have access to browse and pasture, which our current fenced area can no longer provide.  In order to give them access to more variety in their diet, we took them for walks twice a day to browse the back part of our property until it got too cold and snowy to do so.  There’s not much to browse on back there right now, so they’re getting hay.  The fencing and barn building projects that we hope to do this summer (for more info on that, see this post) will allow us to give our goats more access to pasture.  We believe this helps keep them healthy, just like having a varied diet keeps humans healthy.  It also helps to clear our property to make it more usable in other ways.  When we can, we will start rotating the goats through different sections of pasture so that no one area gets over grazed or begins to harbor parasites and other pathogens.

In our conversation, it became clear that this farm is not run in the way we intend to run ours.  There were too many goats in too small of an area.  The ground can’t absorb the amount of poop being put into it, so it gets a lot dirtier.  The goats were friendly, but they didn’t have room to run and play – especially the ones kept in separated small pens.  She vaccinates and uses wormers on a regular basis.  For her herd and their conditions, this is probably necessary.  But, it also means that her goats don’t possess strong enough immune systems to resist on their own.  Since we don’t intend to worm and vaccinate, it’s preferable to breed our goat with one that has a strong immune system.  Since wormers are, essentially, poison, they suppress the goat’s immune system (garlic, our preferred treatment, strengthens the immune system, allowing the goat to fight off whatever it needs to).  We generally weren’t thrilled with the goat housing conditions there, and have decided that we don’t feel comfortable taking Brie back there to be bred.  We gave all our goats garlic last night just to be safe in case she picked up something she hadn’t been exposed to before at the other farm.  Plus, traveling is stressful, so immune system support is a good idea.

We haven’t been around a lot of other people who raise goats.  Really, the only other one we’ve spent much time with is the lady we bought Brie from, and she has the same ideas about goat husbandry as we do.  The websites and books that I read tend to focus more on natural methods of raising animals.  So, it’s easy for me to forget that other people do things very differently.  There were good things about that farm visit.  We did get Brie’s blood drawn, which will provide us information that we need no matter where we take her to be bred.  We also saw the condition of the farm where we were thinking of breeding her before taking her there to be bred.  Now we can set up farm visits for the other places we’re thinking of breeding her to make sure we feel comfortable with the conditions she’ll be in before taking her there.