Homestead mailing list

[Clansgian AT wmconnect.com]

> I have a strong feeling that I'm being mocked,

Instructive that you feel that way while Bev did not.

> 
> The bottom line is that it costs no more to feed a good producer than
> it does a pint-a-day one and that CAE will reduce milk production to
> zip

If you feed a "good producer" and an ordinary flugle goat an artificial and 
expensive dairy diet, then yes, it costs the same to feed them but you get 
more 
milk from the former.   But that difference disappears when the goats are 
managed on a natural diet, and many times the results are reversed with the 
high 
strung goats becoming ill and wan without the artificial diet they've been 
bred to expect.  So the old bottom line is like the saw "it's just as easy to 
fall in love with rich man as it is to fall in love with a poor man" and the 
results are equally as reliable.

The bottom line I'd propose is that in a proper natural environment for 
goats, it costs nothing to feed an ordinary milk goat.  That's some milk for 
nothing.  But an over bred high strung goat in that environment would give no 
more 
milk than the flugle goat and possibly give none while needing to have it's 
purchased feed habit indulged.  Some expense for no milk.    No contest there.

The statement that CAE will (that's WILL) reduce milk production to zip is 
unfounded.  It is like the exortation from the goatateracist that you cannot, 
must not, cannot, ever even remotely contemplate having goats with horns.  
You 
will be maimed, killed, or worse, and you goats will gore each other on a 
daily 
basis and die with their horns trapped in fences and branches.  Not if, not 
maybe, WILL happen.  One frothing goatateracist near here raises kids for 
sale 
at six weeks and if the prospective buyer wants the kids to not be disbudded, 
there is a hefty extra fee.  Why?  Because she must keep the goats separate 
from the 'normal' disbudded goats so that the nasty horned beasties won't 
harm 
the others.  Raving idiot.  Goats don't have horns at six weeks!

I've kept goats for many, many years and all of them have had a full set of 
magnificient horns.  In all that time not one goat has injured me, a member 
of 
my family, or another goat.  Not once.

Like that is the old saw that if a goat has CAE, its milk production will go 
to nearly zero.  Posh!   Although CAE has only been recently identified, it 
has been around for centuries.  SOME goats are affected by it, and most of 
those 
only get arthritic in old age when they are pretty far past milking anyway.  
I wouldn't be surprised that high strung over bred goats are laid low by it, 
but on a practical farmstead a goat would be eliminated if it didn't produce 
enough milk to warrant its keep no matter what the casue.  So goats affected 
by 
CAE are eliminted and those not affected continue on unabated.

The proof is in results.  We (and a great deal of other goat raisers I know) 
ignore the minutia of goatiana advice and don't supplement our goats with 
rare 
minerals, don't dehorn them, don't medicate them in any way whatever, don't 
carefully inspect medical records and milking records, etc.  and yet we get 
all 
the milk we can use, nearly 100% live births, and nearly all those raised to 
maturity with no problems whatever.  Long experience has shown me that 98% of 
the obsessive goatiana from goatateracists is utter rubbish.  So when someone 
on this list asks for advice on goats, I am ill inclined to keep this opinion 
to myself, that is, if you run into a goatateracist, run for your goats' 
lives!

And not just goatateracists, but rabbitologists, chickalogians, 
pigoglotacists, and a host of others so immersed into one interest that they 
detail it ad 
absurdum.  Just like that ancient MesoAmericans who thought that if they 
didn't 
conduct the annual human sacrifices, the sun would fail to wax in the spring, 
these completely immersed people really think that if they don't set the 
chick's water on the north side of the brooder and put exactly two pinches of 
salt 
in it that all the chicks will instantly fall over dead.  They, the immersed, 
would become disoriented and purposeless if most of the worderful detailiana 
that keeps the warm would prove to be  pointless.

That's why the emotional reaction, I suppose.