I have long wanted to visit Linda Calhoun and her goat dairy in Mountainair, New Mexico, and I can report that the mission is accomplished. Here’s a brief report.
Linda has, as I recall, 23 goats, which include a bunch of lactating females, a small group of young kids, and five large, bearded males. I believe the ones shown below are the young ‘uns (Linda will weigh in on this, and supply the breed’s name which I can’t recall):
The goats are friendly and curious, and will suck on your fingers but not bite them. They did, however, try to gnaw the hair off my arms. They have a reputation for eating everything, including the classic tin can motif in cartoons, but Linda says that they don’t eat the cans: they are only trying to gnaw off the paper, which resembles the vegetation they eat in the wild.
And their eyes photograph blue with a flash:
The goats will stand up if you approach the pen, and thrust their goaty faces right at you!
See?
The males are kept individually or in amiable pairs, for they tend to fight each other. And their pens are covered with sheet metal on the sides so they can’t see the females, for if they did they’d try to butt down the barriers. Typical males!
Twice a day it’s milking time (the males and older females go off for meat, but the main object of the dairy is of course to produce goat milk). The milk usually goes to feed baby goats on other farms rather than cheese, but the cats get it, as does Linda’s husband John on his morning cereal. Linda gets up at about 2:30 a.m. to do the first of the day’s two milkings.
Each goat is restrained on a special raised platform while being milked; it has a feeding trough to distract them and lure them up (they willingly climb on each device as they are called: each goat knows its name):
This goat’s udder attests to its load of milk:
A suction device is attached to each goat (two goats are milked at a time). It takes only about a minute to pump each goat dry. Here’s Linda in action:
The milk is aspirated out of the two teats. . .
. . . and is collected in a scrupulously clean stainless steel receptacle. After being milked, each goat gets a handful of peanuts, which they consider a great treat.
Linda has (and I may have gotten this wrong) five cats. I believe two are in the barn and three in the house; the barn cats are mousers but also get to live in Linda’s heated office. All of them are treated well and are in great condition. Sadly, I lost the email in which Linda gave me all their names, so I’ll have to ask her to supply most of them below.
This is barn cat #1, a fuzzy black cat.
Barn cat #2, a short-haired black cat:
This is Clawed Monet, the best name for a cat I’ve ever heard. He’s a friendly fellow and was acquired as a feral tom, so he got a large “apple head” before he was neutered. Clawed liked me, and so I found him on my bed when I turned in for the night. What a nice sight that was!
Clawed snoozing:
I believe there is a third housecat, which is very shy; I never saw it.
Pewter is a friendly gray cat who has the unusual habit of drinking water from the sink. When you go into the bathroom, he magically appears from nowhere and waits for you to turn on the tap. When you do, he jumps on the sink and laps away. He does not care if the water soaks his head in the process, as it’s doing below:
One day we drove the ten miles into town for lunch. It’s a town frozen in time, looking exactly as it must have sixty years ago. (Movies have been filmed in the town because it requires no props to look old.) The drugstore, for instance, sports exactly the kind of soda fountain that I remember from my childhood:
And at the west end of town is the local restaurant, Jerry’s Ancient Cities Cafe:
In my namesake cafe I had a New Mexican signature dish: chiles rellenos, filled with cheese.
I dissected one so that you can see the batter-fried covered chile filled with cheese. These two were great:
On the second evening I was there, John prepared a great mixed salad, and offered me a local beer—one flavored with pecans. (Pecans are one of the major cash crops in New Mexico.) Of course I tried it, as I’d never had a pecan-flavored beer, and I thought it was quite good:
And there’s one local site of historical interest: Salinas Pueblo Mission National Monument. One part of the trio of monuments is the Quarai ruins, where the Spanish built a mission in the early 17th century, basically enslaving the Indians to produce goods that would enrich Spain. Below you can see the ruins of the mission, surrounded by the barely visible remains of the Native American villages, once part of a thriving community that traded salt and other products. The missionaries, I was told, were there mainly to extract wealth for the Spanish crown, not to convert the Indians to Christianity, though that was done as well—forcibly.
Thanks to John and Linda for their hospitality, tour of the goat farm, and provision of felids!
You sure seem to be having a grand time, Jerry!
Er… and sub.
Jerry, you are an evil person for showing me chili rellenos when I am hungry. Yum.
Goat’s arse = Christ crucified. Hallelujah and pass the collection plate!
The Spanish saw the Indians as a labor resource . The English viewed them as pests to be driven off the land. This may explain why so many more people in previous Spanish colonies have Indian ancestry than in
most of the US.
Really good story about the goats, the cats and the hard working Linda. There will be no vacations around there but then, who needs one.
There are a few goat owners around these parts. I’m not sure how many are doing milking but one or two have batches of goats for rent if you need an area cleaned up. They should get some work after this year with all the rain.
We kept goats at our “hippie-farm” for a while back in the 1970s; we thought that it would be cool, and, “natural” for them to run loose (we also didn’t have our, “fence-trip” together at that time)- we all had pickup trucks, so we didn’t realize how much they liked to climb on top of brand-new cars with their scratchy little hooves until our first visitor arrived!
“we also didn’t have our, “fence-trip” together at that time”
LOL! Those were the days…
What cute cats and goats! The goats ears seemed pinned back – is that just how their ears look or is it part of their expression?
I so love goats! They are smart and curious and I’d really love to have one as a pet.
They don’t have their ears pinned back. They are LaManchas; LaManchas’ defining breed characteristic is tiny ears, a characteristic which is very dominant. If you breed a LaMancha to a longer-eared goat, you will end up with “elf” ears, which are about an inch long and bent over on the end.
And, you can’t have ONE as a pet. They are herd animals, and they don’t thrive in singles. You’d have to get two. L
Ok two then!
Oh, I thought they ate each others’ ears.
I learned all there is to know about goats from Shaun the Sheep.
Interesting, I had assumed that the ears had been removed for health reasons (flies? being bitten by other goats?)
I thought it was just a goaty expression. 🙂 ears back in happiness.
A couple of clarifications:
The does in the first picture are yearlings, last year’s kids.
The second and fourth pictures are this year’s kids.
I actually have seven cats, but Jerry didn’t get to meet the two shy ones, one in the barn and one in the house.
If you look at the picture of the short-haired cat, you will notice the cinderblock on the edge of the cats’ dish. Pewter not only drinks out of the sink, he plays in any water he can find. So, their dish frame has the cinderblock on it to keep him from spilling the water all over the floor and playing in it and tracking it everywhere. This habit wouldn’t be so bad except that he gets into bed with us, and I have to sleep with a damp cat until he dries out. L
Ha ha, great Pewter story! One of my moggie Winston’s nicknames is Nuisance-Pie.
Love the LaManchas–very personable goats. 🙂 Wonderful set-up you’ve got there, Linda.
What is this about tom cats having an ‘apple’ head if they are neutered late? Does the prolonged testosterone make the head more robust?
Yes, I think so. Every tom I’ve ever petted, that wasn’t neutered young, has a huge, solid head. They feel very different from the head most of us are used to touching on cats.
That’s my experience of this anyway.
Jerry do they not have to pasteurize the goat’s milk before consumption?
Yes, we pasteurize everything.
After the milking is done, the milk is strained through a milk filter into pasteurizer buckets, which are then placed in water-filled jackets with heaters in the bottom and thermometer readouts on the sides. The milk is heated to 161F and then cooled in cold water, and then refrigerated. L
Thanks, Linda!
Aaaghh – goats with blue lasers!
You mean… goats with frickin’ lasers on their heads?
😀
Likely folks already know in re goats’ prehension with respect to the descriptor verbs … … to suck, to bite or to gnaw: these are ruminant animals, of course, which means for almost all of them Worldwide only a dental pad – like measure of firmed tissue upon its upper anterior jawline as thus:
http://www.thekebun.wordpress.com/2008/10/02/goats-have-no-upper-front-teeth.
Such an altogether fascinating post! For some, ’twill make quite Dr Seuss – clear: “What Pet Should I Get?”
Blue
The blue colored reflection is due to the choridal tapetum fibrosum. It provides light-sensitive retinal cells with a second chance for photon-photoreceptor stimulation (and therefore enhances visual sensitivity especially in dim light).
The tapetal layer is variable among species, and can lie either within the retina itself, or in the choroid (the layer adjacent to the retina). Goats (along with other herbivores), have regularly arranged collagenous fibers within the choroid. Carnivores have a cellular choroidal tapetum packed with highly refractive tapetal rodlets. And there are other tapetums out there too 🙂
The color varies based on thickness of the tapetum, age, species, and breed. If you have photos of your feline and canine companions when they were kittens/puppies, you may notice a blue reflection if the photos were taken with flash. That blue will often change to a yellow/green reflection after the structures in the back of their eyes fully mature around 6-8 months of age.
And then of course everyone is familiar with “red eye”! Humans don’t have a tapetum (neither do the majority of primates, squirrels, birds, red kangaroos, or pigs). And in color dilute animals like blue point Siamese or Siberian huskies (among others), they will also demonstrate “red eye” for the camera. The red is due to the choroidal blood vessels.
Thank you for this explanation !
Excellent !
Blue
Glad you both found it helpful 🙂
Thanks. I had always wondered about that.
Me too. Very interesting.
Very interesting!
When I go out at night here, I’ve noticed that White-tailed Deer have green eye-shine when I catch them in my flashlight’s beam.
Now, your name isn’t really Aldo Leopold, is it? And, if so, are you related to theAldo Leopold, who wrote one of my favorite books, A Sand County Almanac?
I was surprised by this…is that a normal time of day for the goats to nurse? Don’t the goats object to being woken up in the middle of the night?
b&
We start milking at around 4:15 am, which is pretty standard for most dairies. After I get up, I eat breakfast, set up the milkroom, and feed the horses, donkey, and dry stock.
The babies don’t nurse. They are fed pasteurized milk from feeder buckets. This is why they’re so tame.
Also, I clean my pens every day in the summertime, which keeps the ground cool and the flies down. If I milked later in the morning, by the time I finished raking pens, it would be pretty hot, but this way I’m finished before it heats up.
And actually, they are very adaptable. I have two friends who both milk at noon and midnight – nether one is a morning person. L
Being a, “dairyman” is a time-consuming job: Years ago I was talking to a Missouri dairyman that had a fairly good-sized herd of milk cows- I asked him, “How long does it take to milk them all?” He answered with a grin, “We start milking about 5 AM, and we get done about 5 AM the NEXT day.”
I’m guessing you either don’t get vacations or they’re something of a major operation to prepare for and coordinate….
b&
I was waiting for a ferry one time in the far west (of Scotland, not Middle Earth) where several goats were tied up to the windbreak beside the jetty. The boatman kept lots of parts for the boat (and possibly the boat itself) in the windbreak, and the goats were chowing down on one of these “spares”. A lead-acid battery, probably from a car, or the outboard motor, had split and was spilling it’s guts out across the stony lochside, and the goats were carefully picking out the powder of lead superoxide from between the grid of lead that makes up each plate.
I did point it out to the boatman as the next load of passengers came across, but he was of the opinion that “if it’s not good for them, they’ll throw it up”. A tad optimistic, I thought.
If I remember right, the Romans used lead goblets for their wine because of its sweetening effect. I’d expect goats to have a sweet tooth….
b&
Feed isn’t (sometimes) coated with molasses for nothing!
Sounds like granola!
b&
Some lead compounds ARE sweet-tasting; that’s the main reason that children get into the habit of chewing lead paint chips, with the usual dire consequences. It’s interesting, now, that they’re looking into ingestion of lead in childhood as contributing to neurological problems such as violence and impulse control.
I think the Romans used lead (well, pewter) because it was easier to handle than glass and cheaper than bronze. (Actually, there’s some evidence that it was Peak District of England lead that became relatively cheap, after the Claudian invasion.)
I don’t notice any particular sweetening of the beer in my pewter tankard. Don’t know about wine.
This is the reference I was vaguely remembering:
b&
Those goats are hilarious.
We have a cat named Achilles, to whom I’ve been known to refer as “Clawed Achilles” (a reference to Debussy, whose full given name was Claude-Achille).
I’ll never be able to visit these beautiful places and try these fantastic looking foods – not on a UK nurse’s salary – and I love reading through these posts of Professor Coyne’s. Keep them coming!