Meet the goats! Part 5

This is George. He is three years old and is Daisy's son.

He moved out and was part of the brush herd for a while, but last winter he decided to take things in a different direction. We were doing a job for a couple who have a lot of trees on their property. They were going to take a lot of them down, so we didn't have to worry about the goats killing the trees. As it turned out, one of the trees almost killed George. I got a call while I was at one of the obligatory family Christmas parties that one of the goats had his leg stuck in the crotch of a tree and it was clearly broken. We rushed out of the party and up to rescue George.

I have set my fair share of broken goat legs, but I had never seen anything like this. He was trying to walk on the broken leg! We picked him up and put him in the back of the car and got him home. I wrapped his leg as best I could while he was still trying to walk on it (which is a stomach-churning thing to witness). We took him for an x-ray two days later. Goats never get injured during office hours. It looked pretty straightforward, so we splinted it and took him back home. One of the things you always have to check for with a broken leg is blood flow. If the splint is on too tight it can cause the blood to stop flowing and damage the leg. I checked his foot the next morning and it was cold. Very long story short, after wrapping his leg up next to his body for a few days, and straightening it back out again, on and off for six weeks, I finally took the splint off to discover that the leg was totally dead. It turned out that the nerve had been severed while his leg was in the tree, and that stopped the blood flow. That's why he was walking on it. He couldn't feel it. So after all that work and stress and worry about was he getting gangrene (seriously, don't ever Google it), he had to get his leg amputated.

After a week of changing his pressure dressing twice a day and another week of healing before the staples could come out, he is living a quiet life with the milking herd. He is happily retired. His diet is more boring now, but the terrain is easier.

He's a very sweet, shy boy who gets to live out his days being coddled. Not such a bad life after all, and you should see him hop! He can really move.