Due to more creative goat activity, all the goats were in same field when I went to feed them this morning. We will see what damage has been wrought in about five months.
There was something wrong with the chorus of begging goats this morning as I walked down the driveway. The sound was unified, as though all of the goats were standing together aaaaannnnnnd waitaminute! They are! ARGH! All of the goats were standing at the main front gate staring at me. Oh, this is not a good thing.
My first thought was that one of the less solid fence-to-barn joints had been bent open. Or maybe one of the fence-to-post clips had broken. Happily, that was not the case. When I got into the field, the reason for the sudden merger was obvious. This morning, sometime between when I let the dogs out before their breakfast and when I went back out to feed the goats, the goats managed to take the 6-foot-long internal gate off of the hinges. The gate was still chained shut. It was just standing open from the other side. Duh.
It's probable that nothing untoward happened and that the hanky-panky was kept to minimal snorting at each other as everyone bent their mental powers towards the house to get me out to feed them. Maybe the boys were more interested in yelling for their breakfast than chasing the girls. It's also probable that none of the girls were in heat this morning. However, if the boys caught anyone in heat, they had maybe a half an hour to do their thing, which is plenty of time. (And no, it's nowhere near warm enough for the boys to be infertile yet.)
Once I had everyone separated again, I looked the girls over for tell-tale signs of wet behinds. No one looked particularly mussed, which is a good sign. And no one was "crunching" either, though I might have missed that if she got caught early on.
Amusingly enough, during my machinations to get the goats re-separated, Loki was half-heartedly chasing Alys around. At least he knew which one was meant for him.
And in contrast to the last fencing failure, this particular one has the potential to result in more life, not death.
I'm hesitant to use lutylase on all of the girls this time around for a variety of reasons - 1. I don't think anything happened; 2. All of the girls are old enough to carry a kid at this point; 3. If anyone managed to do anything, it would have been Jared or Loki because Justin and Madison were getting beaten up every time they got near anyone. Somehow a father-daughter pairing doesn't bother me as much as a brother-sister pairing does. ::shrug:: No one said I was rational about it.
