Things I'd never really considered before

A chicken can lose its voice. There's an old lady hen in the upper paddock that lets out this hoarse cluck every time I go to gather her eggs. At first I thought it might be like humans losing their voices, but now I'm pretty sure she's got it for life.

Chickens can lay really strange eggs. Again with the old ladies again. Obviously fertility doesn't last forever and neither do hens' ability to lay beautiful smooth brown eggs. We get eggs that have rough sand-like shells, ones with holes in them, odd shaped ones with blunt corners, and occasionally one without a fully hardened shell. I think we scared a chicken when we drove in to the paddock the other day and it dropped a fresh egg on the ground with a thin paper like shell. Weird.

The circle of life for a baby goat. Last week a baby goat was born and its little wet and curly haired self was the cutest thing ever. We brought him and his mama to a separate shelter in the front yard so they could bond and she would learn how to nurse him as a first time mother. The mom had little clue what to do at first and we helped the baby goat who couldn't stand to suck, giving him both formula and mama's teet for milk. We kept up the assisted feed regimen for 2 or 3 days. The baby goat should have been standing by then. He could get his back legs going but his front legs were like rubber when we would set him upright. He'd put the tiniest amount of weight on them and collapse like a pile of sticks. The next day I went out to feed him and he wouldn't suck. We tried the bottle as well and he wouldn't take to that either. Occasionally he'd let out a bleat and turn his face, so we figured he wasn't hungry. He'd had a huge meal the night before. But later in the day it was more of the same. The next morning Daniel came in with a freezing cold goat and put him in a a warm bath. By then I'm sure he was unconscious or possibly worse. I asked Daniel how we'd know if he'd gone and he said the goat would go stiff. Sure enough, later that afternoon he was done. You can't really force a baby goat to drink milk if he doesn't want it and it wouldn't do much good in the long run. Daniel says that whenever they've given their goats antibiotics or fixed their ailments in the past, then those goats are the first to go in a storm. They simply aren't as strong as healthy goats. So we let the baby goat go and now he's being saved in the freezer for possum bait.