Measuring Up

Today we measured the goats and the sheep.  Farm Girl took all the measurements.

While I jotted down all the numbers to calculate their weights later.

If you are wondering what the formula is to measure your goats or sheeps weight, here it is.  You will need to take two measurements.

Our goats came back smaller than we had wanted.  The two yearlings came in at 40lbs, just slightly larger than our pygmy goat, while the two older ones came in around 65lbs.  Our biggest and oldest goat came in at 80lbs.  Obviously, everyone is smaller than we had anticipated.  

The sheep, however did much better with an average of 82lbs, the largest being 96lbs and the smallest at 68lbs.  Other than the ewe who came in at 68lbs, we are very happy with the weights.  I had thought they were all around the 60-70lb mark.  So am glad at least where they are concerned I'm not doing too bad.  The ram actually only came in at 86lbs which was disappointing.  Not really sure where he should be at this point, but since one of the ewes weighs more than him, am thinking that's probably not a good thing.

So after we finished weighing everyone, we went outside and measured Caesar, our young buck.  Though he has always looked solid and robust, he actually came back at 54lbs.  Now we have taken him off grain and good quality hay and that along with his dislike of being separated from the other goats could have resulted in a weight loss  We really have our fingers crossed for Caesar as I really like the look of him.  

He appears to be a solid dark brown boar goat but in fact he is part nubian.  He hides his colouring under his belly where he has a lighter shade of brown and one single white spot.

As mentioned in my previous post we decided to bring in a doe one at a time daily from now until the end of the month.  He's been doing a lot of this.

And a lot of this.

A little bit of chasing.

But not nearly enough of this.

And, yes, we do have Gabby's head locked in the gate door.  We thought it might help the young buck out a bit.  But either he isn't measuring up and really is a dud stud or the girls simply aren't in heat anymore.