RIP Cupcake

As the title of this blog post suggests, it was a sad morning on Our Maker's Acres Family Farm.  When I walked out to milk Clarabelle this morning before church, I found Cupcake dead by the garden gate that leads into the pasture.  You might remember our posting about Cupcake, our disabled goat.  You can click the hyperlink and read about her disability.  She was about 10 months old.

Frankly, I don't know what caused her death.  Other than her front two legs which didn't work normally, she was the picture of health.  Tricia spent hours splinting her legs and doing 'rehab' with her.  Here lately, she was walking on her own (bowlegged, of course and limping) about 300 feet to eat grass in the pasture.

Although she didn't really need to, it became an afternoon tradition that Tricia would walk out across the pasture each afternoon, pick up her little Cupcake, and carry her back to the barn.  Last night was the first night in months and months that she didn't do it.  We are guessing that perhaps one of the other animals (one of the milk cows, or Buckwheat, the buck goat) head-butted her and fatally injured her.  They were really rough with her at times, and Tricia would rescue her and put her in one of the stalls in the barn to segregate her from the others.  For the most part, she made it just fine on her own.  She and Tricia were closely attached.

I hated to tell Tricia this morning, but she said, "I'm a farm girl.  This kind of stuff happens.  Before you bury her, I want to tell her goodbye.  She had such a cute little head."  We had church today and caroling for shut-ins this afternoon, so it was after dark before I could tend to Cupcake.  I got a shovel and measured her footprint and dug a 2 1/2 foot deep hole in the very back of the garden.

As Tricia watched, we laid little Cupcake to rest.

I heard a rustling behind me and turned around to see the saddest thing.  Agnes, Cupcake's mom, had come by to bid her farewells to her little girl at the impromptu ceremony.  It was kind of touching.

We'll miss little Cupcake.  She was a fighter and determined not to let her disability keep her from living a somewhat normal life.  It will be different without her on the pasture.  But, newsflash!:  The does are all getting fat.  I think they are all bred and we'll be having a lot of baby goats on the farm this spring.