In the last three days, we've lost two goats -- one for unknown reasons... wait, make that three.

Yesterday evening, I was 'watering the geese' which means turning on a faucet near where we are going to plant grapes this year, and heard a most distressing goat yell. I looked toward the sound and saw a kid lying on the dirt and ran to it. Mike was in the barn, familiarizing the new kids by picking them up.

The wounded kid, whose parentage we'll have to discover this evening, seemed to have a broken neck. It was leaning its head back as far as it could and at first, of course, I thought it was dying.

I yelled for Mike and he came, picked the kid up and brought it into the house (standard operating goat procedure). It had been raining a bit and the kid was filthy with sand. We washed it off in the sink and dried it, put it on some towels and gave it some aspirin with some milk. This year, we purchased a kid-saver -- a handy device that has a long tube that we can snake down into a kid's stomach to give it food. We did this twice in the evening. It didn't save it.

Mike said that the kid gave a final yell and squirmed a lot around1am in the morning, and that was the end of it.

But now comes the question.. HOW did it get into such bad shape? We are, at the moment suspecting our livestock guardian dog, Brisket. The only reason for this is that he has been known to chase the kid goats around unmercifully and yesterday, Mike saved an armadillo that Brisket had in his mouth and was shaking the poor creature as hard as he could.

So we think that Brisket was full of himself and had shaken this kid until the kid's neck was broken. The sounds from the kid were not of the kind of distress sounds from a goat with stomach problems. These were pain sounds, uncomfortable pain.

But there are other options. The kid could have been thrown by one of the adult goats for simply being in the way or trying to drink milk from the wrong mom. We don't know.

But then again, we think Brisket did this to a chicken this past year... playing with it and slobbering all over it before the chicken just died (probably a heart attack).

Hard to tell, but if this is the case, we're going to have to put the dog down. He won't make a good livestock guardian and he is definitely not suitable as a pet.

This was not a good day.

We now have:
52 goats (of which, only one is a milk goat)
6 geese
9 guineas
60 chickens
2 cats
2 dogs