Udder End Farm

Mankind has always felt a need to leave his mark in many places. Prehistoric man left his mark in caves in Europe. Pioneers left their mark across the rolling plains and the Rocky Mountains. Teenagers have left many a mark on boxcars and highway overpasses; and, for Pete’s sake, somebody even left America’s mark on the moon!

I visited the Y-O Ranch in Texas and was interested to see that they put their mark all over everything- walls, fences, the sofa, the doors, tables, chairs and even the floors. The swimming pool was a giant Y-O shaped thing. Go figure. Do those Y-O folks ever attempt to leave their mark on goats? I’m keenly interested in making an impression of some kind on goats.

In three days I’m taking eighteen goats and two small daughters to a goat show. The daughters are easily identifiable and most people get out of their way immediately. The goats at first appear indistinguishable from any other red headed goats in the world. In some people’ minds this can be a problem. Some people feel that everything has to identified and labeled and bar coded and microchipped. They have a need to leave a mark in this life, even if it’s on my goat. Admit it, it’s a conspiracy.

I can’t afford microchips and until I met goats I was rabidly opposed to them on principle. I do tattoo, and you tattoo too, and everybody who is anybody tattoos: or at least they claim to. Do we do this for the purpose of identifying our goats? Not hardly!

Goats are identified by their faces, or their spots, or if your mind is really failing, you identify your goat by its eartag. If the silly goat lost its tag you identify it as “the one who lost her tag” or “the one in the south forty that lost her tag”. My favorite Texas breeder has 5000 goats and she never looks at those stinking tattoos. She recites names and 5-generation pedigrees for each animal from memory, and only in the last 150 or so goats has she begun referring to eartags (Oh no, dearest friend! I didn’t mean to suggest your mind was failing!).

Maybe if you pay $20,000 for a goat you’ll check its tattoo; but you wouldn’t, because you can’t fake a $20,000 goat. Everyone in the world knows that goat distinctly. Maybe if you pay $2,000 for a goat you should check the tattoo; but you might not, because if you pay $2,000 for a goat you probably bought it from someone you know and trust. I bought a goat for $200 several years ago and I still haven’t looked to see if she has a tattoo. $200 just ain’t worth it.

Sooo… We tattoo because the registries require it. We tattoo against the day when memory and eartags fail us. We tattoo because it’s the right and smart thing to do, and we tattoo (Admit it! It’s a conspiracy) because we want to go to the goat show. We hope, or expect, someone to walk up and inspect those tattoos before handing us that pretty ribbon. By golly! I sure think they ought to hand out pretty ribbons to anybody who managed to get any kind of legible tattoo on any kind of goat. An Inksman Award.

At this point, I ask all of you tattoo your newborn kids before they are dry and have had their first colostrum to leave the room. Go lie down in the road or something.

When my kids hit the ground, I go out with my little notebook, record their pertinents and vitals, and assign each of them some kind of number. This number probably, hopefully corresponds to an eartag which I will probably, hopefully, insert sometime between one week and three years of age (Hey- you manage your goat herd and I’ll manage mine, OK?).

This number may or may not correspond to the eventual tattoo because I’m fiddling around with different equations and still looking for the one that makes me happy and reveals all the cosmic secrets of each animal. Anyway, at some time in their lives, many of these goats will be subdued and tattooed. Probably, hopefully, the magic number, eartag, and tattoo will all correlate to sum up the life of the goat, just like your Social Security number does for you.

At some point I will get a wild hair and decide I want everyone to see some special goat. For a time, I only felt this way about goats I had bought and not bred. The people I bought my first goats from were much better at it than I was, but most important, those goats had already been tattooed (Probably. Hopefully). Now, after buying so many good goats and putting them together in wonderful ways, I’ve come to the point of wanting to exhibit my own goats. Now comes the day of reckoning. Now it’s time to tattoo my own goats. I’d rather take out a second mortgage and buy the microchips.

So how do you tattoo? Do you put on the ink and then punch, or do you punch and then put on the ink? Do you use the ink in the tube or the stuff in the jar? Do you rub, daub, or use a toothbrush? Do you like black ink, or green, or even white? Green is my favorite. Have you ever considered wearing rubber gloves? OH! Do you know the baking soda trick? I don’t; I thought I did but actually I don’t know the baking soda trick, or any other trick that might help the tattooing situation. My tattoos disappear. Like magic, they just disappear.

Some tattoos disappear within three days- three days before a show. Some tattoos last for several months, until I decide I like the look of the goat and decide to show it. Then the tattoo washes off with the first bath. If I re-tattoo after the bath it just disappears in the trailer on the way to the show. Someday I’m going to pull up my trailer mats and find all those lost tattoos stuck to the floor. Some tattoos last a whole year. I turned out a nice 2-year old buck over the winter just after inspecting his very legible tattoo. In the spring, when he weighed 300 pounds I pulled him in, bathed him, and won a first place with him before I realized his tattoo had disappeared. Frantically, I shoved him into a corner and we worked each other over. He went into his championship class with a green ear. I went into that class with a fat lip. Judges take a rather dim view of that sort of thing.

There was once an exception to the disappearance rule. An enthusiastic nine year old helped me set up the tattoo pliers. Several goats are now walking around my yard with reversed and/or transposed digits in their ears. I know those tattoos stayed firm and bright because I took them all to a show last month and none of them matched any papers in my herd book. Sometimes a lost tattoo will temporarily reappear at an awkward moment. Remember the buck we discussed with the green ear? The last judge to award him a champion rosette was able to discern three separate tattoos on the same ear. Fortunately he was of the opinion they all said the same thing. I’ve permanently retired that goat from the showring after assuring myself there were absolutely no markings of any kind in any of his ears.

I’m sorry friends. I just don’t have good answers for you. If you hope to make your mark in the goat world, my best advice is to invest in a box of surgical gloves and a good pair of hockey breezers. The gloves keep your manicure safe. The pants help keep bruising to a minimum (did you ever stop to think that tattooing goats could kill you? Yeah-big bruises on your thighs can form blood clots that kill you deader than spring bloat-eh?). These are good investments because you’re going to use them over and over again; probably on the same goats.