Oh...his balls fell off...

Okay, be honest, how many places other than a farm type setting are you going to hear such a statement said without panic behind the words?

When our little wether arrived he was still technically a buck. The people had just put the band on him that morning. Now its not that we are newbies to banding and were over-reacting. We have banded bucklings before.

But Buddy was underweight and was suffering from worms and cocci and at six months was a little big for banding. We didn't feel he was handling the stress of banding well. He seemed so down and in a lot of pain, so we snipped the band off and figured that if he wasn't a wether it wouldn't be that big of a deal although we weren't sure if he would ever be fertile or anything like that.

At first there were no changes in his manly parts. In fact for the first month after he was here, we were sure we had another buck. But it always looked a little pinched at the top of his testicles where the band had been. Over the next month, a black line formed across the pinched area and his testicles began to shrivel up to nothing. And we became sure that we in fact were going to have a wether, which was preferred anyway.

Today all of the goats got their feet trimmed. It will be the last time I trim feet on the girls before they kid. They will all be a hundred days bred soon and I don't want them to have to try balancing on three legs while being heavy bred.

Now I know this morning at feed time, Buddy still had his shriveled testicles swinging around. This afternoon I pulled him from the pen he shares with BigWig and led him over to the patio and trimmed his feet up-they are looking really good now by the way.

As my mother was leading him back to his pen I noticed that his testicles were gone and said, "Oh...his balls are gone."

My mother looks back and says, "What?" So I repeat myself.

She replies, "Oh, really? Are they on the patio? I'd hate for the dogs to get them."

It was then that it struck me that people who live a lifestyle that includes livestock can have some really crazy conversations.

They were not, by the way, on the patio. Not sure where they got off to since we didn't see them in the pen anywhere either.




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