Our little Nubian triplets are 4 weeks old and
their little horn buds are coming in. It
is high time to do something about it.
Some call it de-horning and some call it disbudding, but the result is
the same – you remove the horns of the animal.
The decision to dehorn or not to dehorn is one that many people struggle
with. There are pros and cons to keeping
goats with horns.
I read with interest that goats cannot sweat. Horns allow them to regulate their body
temperature. Interesting. Horns also allow goats to protect themselves
against predators. Horns allow the goats
to scratch those “hard to reach places.”
Horns give the goats ‘handles’ that humans can hold while working on
them.
The cons are that goat horns can be quite dangerous. Dangerous for other goats. Dangerous for people/kids. The horns can grow quite sharp and put out an
eye if you aren’t careful. Then, goats
have a habit of squirming and fitting their necks through the fence to eat the
green grass on the other side. If the
goat has horns, they could be trapped until you untangle them from the fence
and/or they can destroy the fence or strangle themselves.
We like to remove the horns from our goats. It is not something I look forward to
doing. For Annie, I tried a process
using an elastic band you use to castrate a young bull. The process was successful in removing her
horns but scurs (small misshapen horns) grew back. We wanted to try an electric dehorner, but
the one we borrowed to dehorn our bull, Chuck was too big. Fortunately for us, a friend of ours had all
the equipment and offered to help us dehorn Buckwheat, Darla, and Jane.
In addition to bringing the electric dehorning element,
he brought a cool box shown below. You
simply put the kid into the box.
And then close the lid.
Just the goat’s head sticks out of the box and you can even tuck their
ears inside and out of the way.
The box has a divider in the bottom so that the kid can’t
sit down, but remains upright and erect while the procedure is underway. One person handles the dehorning and one
holds the animal so that it is immobile.
The dehorner is plugged in for 30 minutes to allow it to
heat up.
Then it is applied over the little horn buds. This is the unpleasant part. Smoke fills the room along with the smell of
burning hair. The goat cries and it is
kind of a heart-wrenching thing. It is
essentially like branding an animal with a hot iron.
The heating iron is pressed down until a copper colored
ring encircles the little horn buds. The
little horn buds’ tips can be flicked off and then the iron is pressed on the
top of the horn buds. This kills the
root of the horns and stops their growth.
We apply some Blue Wound Coat spray to the area to ward
off infection, but there is no blood in this process.
Here are all of the little tips of the triplet’s horns
that came off.
While they screamed bloody murder during the procedure,
they quickly recover and are running around playfully in just a few minutes
like nothing happened. The ‘out-patient’
procedure being finished, we decided to give them a full checkup and weigh
them, so I went and got the scale and we placed a big blue molasses tub on top
and zeroed it out and then placed each kid into the tub to weigh them.
And here is where we figured out what is going on with
the three kids.
- Jane weighs 16 and 3/4 pounds
- Darla weighs 11 and 1/2 pounds
- Buckwheat weighs 14 pounds
The weights of the kids tells the story. Jane is getting Annie’s left teat and sucking
it dry, while Buckwheat and Darla share/fight over the other one. As a result, Jane grows at a faster pace than
her siblings, but Tricia is milking Annie and feeding Darla and Buckwheat with
baby bottles filled with Annie’s milk supplemented with some of our cows’
milk. They’ll all be okay, especially
since we’ll be weaning in a couple of months.
So dehorning is done.
Special thanks to our friend and his family in North Louisiana for their
expertise and equipment.
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