Kidding around the block

• By Natalie Pitfield

Summer is a joyful time on a lifestyle block.

While our own goats are older now, we loved watching our neighbour’s goats have babies.
We coined a term for when they’re springing around madly – “boinging”. You can’t help but smile when a baby goat is going boing, boing around a paddock.

One day, I went to walk my dogs and found a baby goat huddled beside our house. I knew he had to have come from next door, so I took the dogs back inside, and when I came back out, he was gone. Luckily, my parents had seen him trot off into our forest.

I had a French traveller named Leo on board, so he and I set off to find the baby goat. The forest is extremely steep and slippery with fallen leaves. We clambered around for almost an hour and were about to give up when Leo spotted the brown baby tucked beside a brown log. He tried to herd him up toward me, and I was able to grab him.

The next challenge was climbing the fence over to my neighbour’s property whilst holding a baby goat. I took him as close to the herd as possible and let him go. He bounded over to his mum, but she promptly rejected him because he smelled like me from being tucked into my chest while I carried him. I waited a while to see if she’d change her mind, but she kept moving away from him.

I was worried as he was obviously hungry after being away from mum for so long. I sent my neighbour a message and told him that if mum permanently rejected the baby, we could help with bottle feeding if need be.

You can imagine my relief when a few hours later, my neighbour sent a picture of the baby feeding happily alongside his sibling.

I congratulated Leo on a job well done. I wonder how many other travellers who do a bit of work on farms can say they’ve had to hunt for a baby goat? There’s never a dull moment at our place.