The Surprise Goat Buyer

Since we now have four goats, counting the kids, we decided to send Clarabelle back to the stud in hopes that she'd get pregnant this time and give us milk, and also to give us time to raise the babies.  We didn't feel too guilty having one mother and two babies on property zoned for two goats, since the babies are tiny, and we figured we could sell/slaughter the babies in a month when Clarabelle came back.

Today we got a surprise text: the experienced goat breeder who owns the stud says that Clarabelle is already pregnant!  She probably only has one kid in her, which is why she looks so much smaller, and she's due sometime in the next month.  Rea is vindicated; she's been telling us Clarabelle is pregnant too for weeks.

This poses a bit of a problem, as Clarabelle will be coming home and reproducing in the near future.  We are not prepared to have 5 or more goats at our home (we do try to obey the law), so we decided to take drastic measures.

We have already contracted to sell one of the goats in a month, when it's ready to be weaned.  But we are now concerned about how well that will work out, and we had a surplus buckling.  We discussed the possibility of slaughtering it now, or keeping it and hoping that no one noticed and tattled on us to the government.  But then we got a phone call from an interested buyer, so we offered to drop the price if he'd take it right away.  He agreed to come tonight!  We figured he raised bucklings for meat and was experienced with this kind of thing.

When he arrived to pick up the goat, he had two friends with him. He followed me to the back to catch the goat and then we carried it to the front while talking about the goat. He said that he wanted a pet for his daughter's birthday and thought a goat might be fun.

He asked a couple of questions that made it obvious that he doesn't know anything about goats, so I told him that the goat would need high fat milk (whole milk at least), and would want a lot of company. He was not deterred, and wanted to buy the goat, so I sold it to him. 

I am now having second thoughts about having sold the goat to someone who has probably not done any research into goats at all, but he already has the goat, so it is not like I can do anything now. I suppose that I have to consider that in the worst case scenario the guy will decide after a month that a goat is too much work and sell it on KSL again. This time to an actual goat meat breeder.

So, until we get Clarabel back we are again at a legal amount of goats.