I've had enough of goats - for the moment at least

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For the past fortnight I’ve been helping my sister and nephew with their goat stud. One of the main chores was bottle-feeding 40+ little goats. This might sound a cute and cuddly job but let me assure you it was a fight for survival – mostly mine! The kids were separated into groups of varying sizes (usually six to eight in a pen) mostly according to age and/or sex. My nephew milked the adults while my sister and I were responsible for the feeding. We could feed four at a time so we would split the larger groups by shutting some in smaller areas within their pens. Say we had a pen of eight, they would all follow us into the small pen so that was the easy part but then we had to get out of the pen ourselves and hopefully leave four behind. That was the hard part. If you managed to get the gate half-shut on four they would all push and shove to get through. While you were pushing one head back, three more were shoving for all they were worth. The older the groups of goats the harder it was to split them up. Once you had split them you had to fasten the gate. Although the fastenings were quite easy to manage you’d have at least three sets of tiny teeth trying to suck your fingers while four others would be chewing on your shoelaces (they were past masters at undoing laces), your shirt, your jeans or bunting you anywhere they could reach trying to find milk. Once they were finally split feeding was the easy part. However it was all good fun. Some have now been sold and will soon be going to new homes. In the photo they are browsing on some branches that we have tied to the fence. If you mentally replace the branches with a gate and me, that is what we were contending with. The closest one is Mouse and the spotty one is called Blizzard. I’m not sure of the others. At the moment, I am pretty much over goats!