Dontcha Know

On February 4, 2016, Dontcha Know was birthed by his dam Jenny, along with his brother, Laddie Buck, and sister, Wot Wot. His sire is Pecan, who he never got to meet. His nickname is Dontcha and his coloring is called cou blanc (in French it means "white neck") consisting of white forequarters, black hindquarters and black trim. Dontcha has a loving, big-hearted personality.

​Being the youngest and smallest of triplets, he was naturally going to be the runt. He didn't get a whole lot to drink because he wasn't as strong and couldn't take the teats away from his siblings and he couldn't latch as quickly or suck as hard as they could. Poor runts, for the fight of life is rigged against them. They are born small and weak. In their weakened state they sometimes cannot fight for enough food to survive, they get weaker and are more susceptible to cold and rejection by their mothers, and without human intervention would probably die. Dontcha was a lesser case and without help from us he would most likely still have pulled through. 

​Whenever we were with the goats we made sure all the kids' bellies were full and helped them, especially Dontcha, nurse if they needed to, but we couldn't be there all the time. I offered him a bottle, but he didn't take it because he wasn't hungry enough. In retrospect, I should not have given up until he took the bottle. 

​At a few weeks old, Dontcha developed scours and anemia and I put him on all of my goat meds. He stayed with Jenny at night when the rest of the kids were locked up so he would get plenty of milk. After a few weeks of thinking he was getting better, and then him getting sicker than he was previously, having varied symptoms, lagging behind in growth, and so on, he finally seemed to be past all the sickness. Despite us pumping yucky medicine into him and pulling his eyelids down to check for anemia, Dontcha became very friendly. He didn't, and still doesn't, like to be cuddled or held. He likes being petted like a big goat, with no emotions whatsoever going in either direction. 

Sadly, the problems were not over yet. When he had gotten the CDT vaccine at disbudding, he either reacted to the enterotoxemia vaccine (CD) or his body created an abscess because of the hypodermic needle. I'm guessing he had a reaction to the vaccine, because he later got another abscess in the place where his follow-up shot was.

If you have ever had a goat with an abscess, you probably know how nasty they are to deal with. Some people lance them early on by cutting open the abscess, draining the pus and then flushing the abscess with iodine or another disinfectant. The main argument against that is you have to lance it at the perfect time, right when it is about to burst, else it is very hard to do; it could get infected; etc. I decided to wait until it burst, then pressed it until all the pus came out.

​In these pictures you can see his abscess on the left shoulder.   

I watched Dontcha's abscess closely. It took about two months from the time of his shot for the thing to burst. At first it just grew and grew, until about golfball size. Then the hair fell out and the abscess became bald. Next the skin became dry, started to crack, and he began to ooze nasty pus out of the cracks. At that point I pressed the abscess to get the rest of the pus out and applied some ointment.

Some more pictures of the abscess. I thought I had taken  one after it popped but I can't seem to find it.

After Dontcha's abscess had mostly healed, I noticed that the hair growing back was brown! Dontcha now has an odd brown patch in the middle of the white. What in the world could an abscess have done to cause hair color change? My imagination is at a loss. Actually, it's not, just the ideas it comes up with are too silly to even think about considering. 

​If you hadn't noticed from previous pictures, Dontcha is not the prettiest looking goat ever. Alpines (at least ours) have very precise face markings. It is really quite gorgeous and goes with the rest of their trim very well. Our Mini Alpine kids have the face markings, but they are rather skewed and uneven and, well, ugly. I think Lad and Wot have mostly grown out of it, their faces are now just extremely intricate, but for Dontcha I can't say the same. 

​Dontcha has long and shaggy hair that looks a bit disorderly. That is one of the problems he has never gotten over. His hair is still very shaggy and long.

​There is also a third aspect to Dontcha's not-so-great looks. His white hair, on his cou blanc (if you recall, that means "white neck" in French) has begun to fall out, revealing a rather unappealing grey color. Oh well, he was never that pretty to begin with. 

Originally, I had planned to keep Lad as a companion for Ebony, our Alpine buck. Why? Because Lad was the largest kid and he was gray, a color we didn't have. When Dontcha was a little over two months old, we decided to keep him instead. I had grown really attached to him. He has a very lovable personality, whereas Lad is just a big baby, always crying, getting stuck and left behind, needing help, and even letting Song, half his size, boss him around. Dontcha had the will to survive from early on, which now translates into eating food and drinking milk long past being full until he is totally exhausted. The will to survive also translates into him knowing how to fight. He will fight for food, toys, and just for fun. For Dontcha, fighting is a way of life, and that is exactly what Eb needs: a goat that can and will challenge his authority. 

​Jenny almost never lets her kids nurse. If she does, it means total turmoil and three goats fighting over two teats. We have started leaving her locked in the stanchion after milking and letting two kids at a time nurse. Usually, I let Jenny out after the kids have all had a good bit. One or two kids are still nursing at that point. Once, I decided to leave Jenny locked up until they were all totally finished. Dontcha was the last kid to stop. Boy, could the kid drink and he wouldn't stop. It must have been half an hour, an extremely long period of time for dam raised babies to nurse, when he finally let up. Then he just stood there swaying, with a foamy muzzle and eyes half closed. It was hilarious, he had nursed so long he was milk-drunk!

When Dontcha was sick, we left him with Jenny overnight while the other kids got locked up. In the mornings, when we went to milk the girls, Dontcha would watch the does leave the barn, cry for a moment, and stay with his siblings. Dontcha loves his siblings.

One last picture, my favorite:

By Suzanne Tyler
The Green T Goatherd