good-bye cinnamon! we’ll miss you!

They grow up so fast!

Here he was, just a few minutes old:

And here he is, just eight weeks later, a few minutes before he left us to live with his new family.

Running and jumping and humping everything that would stand still for it… Sob! Cinnamon, it all passed in a blur!

Joking aside, Sophie and I both cried. This is the hardest part of having dairy goats—in order to get milk, you have to have a lactating goat. And in order to have a lactating goat, you have to first have a pregnant goat. And pregnant goats mean goat babies, babies that, in all probability, we can’t keep. Every year, separating the babies from the mamas makes me doubt the rightness of having goats. Mostly I feel like our goats are happy and we’re happy to have them. But around this, the sending away of the unwanted (by the humans, not by the mamas!) kids, I always feel terrible.

Emma is the one who feels it the most here. Her closest buddy and pal is GONE. Look at how they slept each night:

I’ll bet you a hundred dollars they were in the womb like that. That first night he was gone, she kept pacing back and forth on the bed, confused, looking around and bleating….

Did slave owners 150 years ago have these feelings—feelings that must have been so much worse!!!—when they sold children away from their insane-with-grief-parents? I mean, I’m keeping a person (a goat person) in captivity so that I can benefit from a product they create, just like the old slave owners did. Does that seem like too extreme a comparison? Goats are just animals, after all. I don’t know. I’m conflicted!

What I do to deal with it is put a lot of energy into finding people to take our babies who seem kind and loving and desirous of having happy goat friends. I mean, look at these nice people who took him home:

They have another little boy goat named Knuckles who needs a pal. Cin and Knuckles! I predict they will be life long friends.

But still, hearing the mamas cry for their babies, fielding the callbacks from new owners who are worried because their new goat bleats non-stop in distress for three days, well, this part is pretty awful. I don’t want to harden my heart to it, because who wants a hard heart? But I hate it.

On the other hand, I know they do all right. They connect to their new herd and their new humans and they settle down into new happy lives. It’ll be okay. I keep telling myself, and Sophie, that it will be okay. It will. Really.

Here is Cinnamon getting his last suckle:

….and his last hug from Sophie.

We’ll miss him! Well, not the constant humping. (What is it about men, anyway?)

Good luck, buddy!