August 21, 2010
August 21st, 2010
Vigilante Farm, that leading Bethel producer of agricultural whimsy, is pleased to announce that it has expanded rabbit production yet again. I am now running what rabbit breeders call a nineteen hole operation. That is, I have nineteen rabbit cages of varying sizes, each containing an average of about three rabbits.
I have, however, gone from a six doe operation to a four or five doe operation, what with the demise of Alice and the questionable reproductive status of Claudette. Both of these does are contemporaries of the infamous Sister Mary Bertha, the Rabbit That Wouldn’t.
Alice died two weeks before her last litter (perhaps her 12th litter altogether?) was due to be weaned, but those young rabbits never missed a beat. Claudette has taken to planting her tail firmly on the deck when in the presence of Bucko, which could mean one of two things:
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She could be letting us know that she is done breeding; after all, we’re approaching the end of her third year of breeding, and one generally gets two or three breeding seasons out of a doe.
- She could simply be too heavy to breed, which condition I can remedy with short rations; this was not an option as long as she was sharing a cage with some of her recent litter, thus the need for the new cages.
The pigs now have the run of the entire pig pen. Until a week or so ago I was keeping them out of the portion I was using for a garden, but we have finally harvested and processed my spinach and beets and given up on my radishes. Radishes are just about the easiest thing to grow, but if you never get around to thinning them out, then they never get around to turning their little roots into radishes.
The pigs are digging up an impressive bunch of rocks there. Was I really able to grow stuff with all those rocks in the soil?
I may have mentioned the pleasures of giving raw eggs (out of date, non-sellable raw eggs) to pigs. In fact, this is an excellent beer sport. Last week I was doing exactly that with my friend Dave, when one of the pigs happened to put her feet in the trough. I yelled, “Get your feet out of there!” and the pig did just that. Another pig put her feet in the trough, but obeyed rapidly when I shouted, “Feet out!”
My, wasn’t Dave impressed by being in the presence of trained pigs! Well, I had trained them (with the help of a stout stick) to keep their feet out, because while a pig will happily eat pelleted food, it will not eat dry powdered food, which is exactly what happens to pellets when trampled on by hoofs. Then, too, you have to remember where those pigs have been walking.
I went off to feed other animals, but heard Dave occasionally tell the pigs to get their feet out of the trough. The pigs, however, paid him no mind whatsoever, and this bothered Dave. I consoled him with a quote from Will Rogers along the lines of “If you ever get to thinking that you’re important, try telling somebody else’s dog what to do.” Apparently the same principle applies to pigs.
I recently visited an emu farm in Massachusetts, one with upwards of 200 emus. I spent an enjoyable three hours talking with the emu farmer and came away with a number of useful tidbits of information. Here’s one: emus should be fed free choice. That is, they should always have food available to them, for if they do, they will actually eat less. It seems that once they see the bottom of their feeder, they panic and gobble, as if to make sure that they are the ones to get the last bit of food.
Remember the gasoline shortages of the late seventies? Remember the people who lined up for hours to fill their tanks that were already 3/4 full? Seems like the same sort of panic to me.
Paulette, my original girl goat, stopped eating the other day. This is a serious matter with a goat, for unless you can get its rumen operating again, it will starve. This is more or less what happened to Roscoe, so on the two occasions since then when Paulette had stopped eating, I had intervened quickly with a shot (intramuscular) of vitamin B complex and a mixture of mint tea, yogurt and yeasty beer applied orally with a turkey baster, all on the advice of my vet, and it worked.
This time, however, I had no beer, so I went with the shot, the mint tea and the yogurt. When Paulette hadn’t responded by nightfall, I was concerned. When she still wasn’t eating the next morning, I was very concerned. I hustled up some beer from a home brewing buddy, gave Paulette the complete treatment, and she was fine within an hour.
What I gather from this is that of the four components of this treatment, beer is one of the essential components. I could, I suppose, “separate the variables” by omitting, say, the mint tea or the yogurt and see what happens in their absence. Such an experiment would be unnecessarily tough on my goat, though, so I probably won’t do it.
Still, I cannot help but feel that the two essential components are a shot and a beer.
Scott