Since Spanish goats are rare and endangered when we received a request from the Spanish Goat Association for a buck to go to Swiss Valley Foundation we didn’t feel like we should deny that request. Our fabulous buck Lightening Bug left our farm in late July for the trip to Rhode Island where they will store his genetic material to help preserve the species.
We have a visiting buck from the original Wood herd here to impregnate the 2 does we still have open. Once we got him at the farm we quickly figured out he is a bit feral This buck is young and inexperienced, so the does did not seem very impressed with his advances, but we believe that he has done the job he was brought here to do. He has great athletic abilities and can jump any fence in a single bound, now he now is jumping all the fences to get into pastures with animals that we don’t want him to be with (our doelings). Yesterday he tried to do the deed with our wether as he ended up in that pasture, and then he was chasing around and trying to mount our very pregnant doe who is due in the next few weeks for her kids.
I put him in the barn yesterday in a stall with high sides, but the windows were left open in the barn. I went out into the pasture to move goats around and turned around only to find him back in the pasture chasing the wether around again. I summoned Mike to help me, as he resisted my attempts to catch him because he knew that I was going to put him away again. We caught him, used a head halter to tie him up inside his stall in the barn. An hour later we went back out only to find him running around the pasture with the halter on him.
Because of these antics today we left him in the barn. I heard lot of banging around all day inside the barn and was afraid to go in there because I didn’t want to be jumped on by him. When Mike came home from work and we went inside the barn we were stunned to see what he had done. I never even thought to go get a camera, but the barn was torn up inside. He actually ripped a 2 x 6 with a top/bottom door set that was bolted on, off the support post. The doors were pulled beyond the door stop and the door stop was pulled away from the board it was nailed to. Plus the heavy duty hinges on the bottom door were both bent out about 1″ so that we could not even close the door. We had to remove the bolts from the door to pull it off the hinges, bend the hinges back, pound the nails back into the support post and then screw the 2×6 down before we could assemble the door back on the hinges to get it closed. It’s impossible to even conceive how he did this to the door as it was closed and latched from the outside.
I wish I had taken pictures, but were trying to get it put back together before it got dark so I never thought to run into the house to get a camera to document it.
We will be happy to see this buck go home as we don’t know how many more days of his antics like this we can stand. One thing’s for sure, it’s not been boring with him around.