Roller coaster week

To say I've had a bad week would be an understand, following the passing of poor Smudge things just continued on a downward spiral.

I went into the shed one day to find poor Piccolina dead, she was fine 4 hours previously.  Piccolina was Chiquita's daughter and the finest of our 2011 cria measuring a fantastic 16 microns.  I was devastated, the postmortem showed she died of a perforated stomach ulcer.

Then on Good Friday morning I got up to find a very unhappy goat, Nettle (the leader of the gang).  She was in the corner with her head down and looking rather sorry for herself.  She had just under three weeks to go before her kids were due and she had milk coming, but didn't appear to be in labour.

She wasn't interested in breakfast, not even carrot.  Then one of the others (Juan, one of the young bucks) decided to knock her about a bit so I separated her off into her own pen.  She was straining but wasn't dilated; time to call the vet.

Out she came, she agreed she wasn't in labour.  Her gut wasn't working very well and she had bellyache.  After a muscle relaxant, some pain killers and antibiotics, after crying very loudly (!!) she seemed to pick up a bit and had some hay.

By tea time she seemed happier and we went out for a family meal with my parents, brother sister-in-law and niece Faith.

When I went out early Saturday morning she had managed to escape out of her pen but was slumped in a heap next to the bales of hay.  She wouldn't stand and was clearly in a lot of pain so we rushed her to the vets.  Sadly despite surgery we lost both Nettle and her two unborn kids three hours later.

I thought that was my three things and everything would improve.  How wrong was I.

This morning my neighbour who was either driving too fast or not paying attention when driving up our track managed to not only hit Morecombe, my pet lamb from last year, but drive over him with his horsebox.  Morecombe was the most friendly Blackie, who we'd only agreed this morning despite being a boy could live on the hill rather that going to the nasty place that the boys were destined for.

Things can only improve surely!

Not wanting to end on a sad note I thought I'd share some photo's taken today.

There's a couple of girls in this shot that some people will be interested in - Barbilla (brown top right) and Iolani (rolling around in the mud).