Modified Live Virus

So if you aren't personally familiar with myself, you should know that I take alot of pride in my animals health and well being. I don't screw around with organic disasters, I have yet to see any proof that their methods work (I buy organic goats all the time from different people). That said, I do my best to consult the locals and the vet whenever I have a question. When we had sheep we used to give a modified live vaccine for soremouth when the babies were born. It slipped my mind about giving it to the goats. Two weeks ago my favorite goat, Jill, came up to me with a mouth and nose full of sores. It has been very hot lately with alot of dust from logging. I assumed that she got into the honey bee nest up the road or into some yellow jacket nests. I made sure to watch her and considered giving her some childrens benadryl but it didn't appear to be that severe so I just left her to herself.

The next day it had gotten worse. So I brought her into the barn and gave her some antibiotics to prevent an infection from starting up. Following that she got a shot of vitamin B and thiamine (Antibiotics kill the bugs in stomachs so the thiamine counters that) and sent her on her way. I also noticed that my wether goat was also showing the effects of bee stings. I decided to be proactive with him and gave him the shots. The next day his bee stings broke open and became painful sores. My brother and I were discussing the bees and he thought that it sounded like soremouth. I passed it off thinking it was too hot for soremouth to become active. Most viruses and bacteria thrive in the wet, mildly warm spring months.

Another day went by and another goat was showing signs of not bee stings, but a sticker caught in his throat. So he got the shots. My husband came out and took a look and we both agreed sore mouth. After a trip to the coop we decided it was stupid to put off this vaccine, 1/4 of our herd had it.

So we waited until my husband and my friend, Shanee both had a day off and gathered up the goats. It was about 90 degrees, we had put it off for quite a while that day. Not everyone reading is a farmer/rancher and doesn't understand what a modified live virus is. The best way to explain these types of shots to someone who doesn't know is to think of it as a flu shot. I'm not sure if the flu shot is a modified live or a killed virus, but it is the same concept. The vaccine will give you an immunity to the virus. You will suffer very mild side effects, and in turn will be immune to any further infections. With the soremouth vaccine, you can't inject it, what you have to do is cut the skin and dab the vaccine in the cut. I'm not talking about taking a butcher knife to the ear, simply taking an 18 gauge needle and making a small cut will do. Even a razor cut will work, but in this type of situation an 18 gauge will do better. An 18 gauge is about 3 sizes bigger than the needles doctor use on you, so not very big, and you only need about an 1/8 of an inch length to work. So not a deep cut and not a long one.

I went through all of the explanations of how small of a cut is necessary and how little vaccine you need (a small dab, smaller than a drop of water) for a reason. When we are administering the vaccine, one of us has to scratch the ear (my job), one of us has to dab on the virus (Shanee) and one of us has to hold the goats head (Dan). Lots of hands and needles in this equation. Somehow the plunger on the syringe was pushed and a nice stream of modified live was shot onto my husbands face. So far no signs of the virus. Sore mouth is contagious to humans, but goes by the name of Orf. If you would like to get an idea of what Orf looks like, just google it and you can see what Dan may have in store for hisself. As a precautionary measure, we were wearing gloves when we did this, just not face suits.

To make matters worse, our primary source of water is from a spring. It's not a seasonal spring, but you can't water a yard on it, we use a pond for the yard. So after three showers, two loads of laundry and a two year old soaking in the sink with running water for about half an hour our water was zilch. It took about 6+ hours for the water to come back on. This isn't a horribly unusual day in the life of a rancher/farmer. It is somewhat unusual because it is the only week of the year my husband gets a vacation, and he spent it in muggy, hot 90 degree weather. I do hope this blog reaches people with as much ag experience as water we had. It might help to put agriculture into perspective. Just because you are on vacation, doesn't mean you are on vacation.

This is not my photo, the girls didn't come in tonight so I couldn't get a photo. I just googled Sore Mouth in Goats and found this image. Do not have permission and did not ask.

Farming, breed selection and video games

The first two are pretty straight forward, but you add in the third and they just don't go together, or do they?

Years ago I was working in Corvallis practicing our summer habitat surveys with EBAs from all around Oregon. I'm a rancher who was surrounded by meditating hippy girls and skinny jean wearing boys. I am manlier than some of those wimps. I did not fit in, but I didn't really want to. So I found the one other rancher there, amazingly there was one. He was from the East side of the mountains and was working for the ODFW while on summer break from college. I don't remember how we started visiting, but he had worked on some farm where he drove combines and had done quite a bit of work. We were discussing costs of equipment and I jokingly referenced "John Deere American Farmer". From that point on we were buddies. A friend of his had written an essay in college based on that video game. He received an A grade for it. Myself, my husband, and his roommates and just about any other ag student owned the original and the second version of that game.

As if ranching and farming isn't hard enough, we have all laid out $20 to buy a game that allows us to grow various crops, take out loans, buy equipment and face unforseen challenges. They include a Brittney Spears type singer boycotting beef, which causes the market to dive, a wave of locusts, droughts, poachers shooting your cows, and many many more. This game must have consumed at least 2 hours a day. We were in college, in a city and everything to do there did not interest us at all. If this blog prompts you to go buy JDAF, make sure you get the second part, you can run cattle and other critters, many more options. If you can get past the milk and egg one you are a god at video games.

I would like to say I have outgrown such video games, but that would be a lie. During the daytime when it is rainy, or just an unpleasant day out I stay inside with my daughter and watch spongebob or looneytunes. I can only take so much of Patrick star, so I started playing showcattle.com. If you aren't familiar with this game, it is the exact same thing as breeding real cattle, the epd numbers are just different. Sometimes your really expensive embryo calves die, sometimes your cows die, sometimes they come out deformed, it's basically like real life.

Tonight I was reading another article about a little weasel whose name and title are; Wayne Pacelle, president and CEO of the Humane Society of the United States. If you aren't familiar with ag, this little turds name is most likely unrelevant probably because you haven't heard of what he does. Wayne does his best to attack ranchers, farmers and their livlihoods by using examples such as the dairy one that surfaced last year. If you watch, he only uncovers things when one of his proposed ballot measures are about to come out. I'm not going to get into Wayne. He is the professional liar, I don't stand a chance next to him. The reason I reference him along with videogames is to point out that we literally love our jobs.

I get to pick out sires and dams, breed them together and get adorable little babies. I get to see those little babies go to great homes, or go to feed someones family. I get to pick out the management program that will go along with my livestock. Who wouldn't love this? It's a fulltime job plus overtime, but it's just awesome! I'm covered in poop, hair, afterbirth and whatever else everytime I work with my critters and love it. So the next time you see the little Wayne turd pop up on the internet or the television, or whatever other stage will best benefit him, please remember we aren't monsters, he's just a professional liar and is as good at his job as I am at mine.

*I'm not super proud of this post, there's a handful or errors and I should have gone into greater depth, but I've got a goat kidding and can't sit still too long. Here's a photo of the above weasel and Michale Vick, he's a responsible dog owner now, thanks to said weasel. I do not have anyones permission to use this photo, I googled the weasels name and this came up. Maybe we should have a captions contest, I can think of one or two.

Cival war up the hollar

Now that I have started this little blog it has had quite a few views. In fact, over 100 in a day. Some are from Germany, Russia and South Korea. Let me first apologize to the rest of America, I didn't realize I would be representing us when I took on this endeavor. Unfortunately I haven't blown anything up or wrecked anything lately so I thought I would just jot down something that happened a few years ago. I actually have alot of material to work with, I've actually bent a PTO shaft, tore the rear end out of the hay truck, collected road kill to get back at another girl (maid of honor story, she was my accomplice), ex laxed a boy, ex laxed the school (that didn't work I used the wrong kind), put coyote scent in the Junior halls air vents, and those are just starters.

A few years ago..........I decided to take up chicken raising. I don't eat very many eggs and I never eat the chickens, so the reasoning for this is unfounded. I just wanted some chickens. I went to the local cooperative ,and picked out 10 Black Sex Link chicks and three Rhode Island Reds. I just wanted red and black chickens. I spent a small fortune on my newly acquired chicks, making sure they had proper feed, water,and living situations (the previous chickens did not have such nice accomidations so I wanted to do it right this time). Not to mention a heat lamp and of course a heavy duty electrical cord. They were probably about $200 after everything was added up. I brought my new chicks home and set them into their special little pens with the glowing red light bulb. An hour later I went out and noticed they were all panting because I was cooking them with the heat lamp. So I adjusted that and went back inside. They all did pretty good for the next three weeks............until the jack russels came for a visit.

Mom and dad had three little jack russel dogs at the time, Spot, Lucy and Buddy. Spot and Lucy kept with you really well, but Buddy is the demon dog from hell on all critters. He'd circle a mile around you while you were driving down the road, searching for anything that would run. This particular day dad came up to do something with the fish logs, which meant he was close by. I came out of the house to find Buddy eating a corner out of the chicken house. After some persuasion he went back to dad and I went back into the house.

About 20 minutes later my cousins Dylan and Collyn came to the house. I believe they said "there are dead chickens everywhere!" The boys had gone into the chicken house to check out the baby chicks and Buddy had followed. I don't know the details of the slaughtering, all I remember was that one chick somehow made it all the way to the end of the field and the rest were no more. I think I had 5 when this was all said and done. Defeated, I went to dad and protested the chicken massacre (packing multiple peices of evidence)......where I got little sympathy, in reality they are chickens.

That afternoon I had made an appointment with a local 4H girl to go clip her steer up for a jackpot show. The steer looked great before and after the clip so there was little talk about what she needed to do differently. Instead the discussion focused on poultry and dogs. To my suprise, her mother was thinning the flock and she wanted to get rid of a white chicken, a black chicken and a red chicken. I was really excited, the co-op doesn't carry white chickens. She was deemed whitey, another blackie and another brownie.........I'm not very creative with names. They loaned me a dog kennel to take the chickens home in.

I forgot to mention I already had 5 older chickens prior to the chicks, I thought that like cows you should keep replacements every year.................I know...............so when I got home we (my husband and I) crudely built a little pen in the chicken house to keep the new ones from fighting with the old ones. Victory! I had new chickens and one was white. So I went into the house to make something to eat.

I don't remember why he went in, but Dan (husband) went into the chicken house to get something and accidently knocked over our chicken pen. He did this unknowingly. So I am sitting at the dinner table looking out over the driveway and all of a sudden these three chickens attempt to merge with my flock. If you have ever introduced chickens before you can probably visualize this before I go into detail. My old ones had whitey down tearing feathers and picking at her comb all the while she's screaming for her life, the other ones were attacking my red chicken who was running for her life. And the black chicken was having a solo battle with another hen. It was a disaster. Chickens flopping everywhere, white feathers flying in the air, my dog trying to kill the ones running away. The girl in me had had it.

I stomped down the driveway, right through the battle grounds, caught my dads horse and jumped on. My husband wanted to know what I had planned on doing, I tried to ignore him and take off................the only problem was that my horse wouldn't go forward. He would only go backwards....where the electric fence is. So I turned my head to see how far we were from getting fried on the fence and right then he hit it. Bam! The horse lept forward and I got my first taste of whiplash. Now injured and angry I whacked the horse, went for a ride up the canyon, took a breath and went home.

To end this day, I brought the horse home walked up the driveway, changed clothes and went to bed with a bowl of ice cream. And yes, the chickens all survived, though you would have never thought it walking past the piles of feathers. Dan had gathered them up while I was away pouting. Anyone considering buying chickens, just don't. They live past 6 years, or have so far, and they are just a pain in the (sentence enhancer) ass.

Out of Gas

I'm just going to steal this one from my Facebook page;

memoirs of a goat rancher: "It'll only be a 5 minute ride". So I get back from Newport about 12am. On the way in I notice I am missing about 50 goats (hard to miss). So I put alene down, knowing they are only about 5 minutes away. I hop on my not very trusty honday, cranking it to start (alene turned the key on one day and the battery is dead), after a while it started. Things were looking up. I p...

utted down the driveway with my dim head lights and my trusty LED mag light, which doubles as headlights. All the while knowing I am low on petro............I found the goaties on the highest perch of the hill 5 minutes away (about a half mile). So I rallied the troops, trying not to wake the neighbor, and 50 goats chased me down the hill. I got past the first turn and then "sputter sputter" "*&^#! I ran out of gas. Using my skills gained from experience (you would think I would have put some gas into that equation) I coast down the mountain in neutral thinking I had it made. I got to the bottom, cranked and cranked until she turned over and then drove like a madman towards the house...........not getting very far. Reserve was done about 100 yards down the road. She died in the middle of the road, with nowhere to turn off, I could not move her with slick shoes so there she lay. I valiantly hopped off, 50 goats still trailing, and walked home. By some miracle headlights were behind me. The neighbors were just coming home! Thank god! Not that I don't mind being cougar bait or anything. So they took me back to my not so trusty steed, I loaded her up with my 5 gallon jug (smallest one I have) and drove like a mad goat woman home. Moral of the story kids, when the husband isn't home and there is noone else to blame for you running your bike out of gas, you should probably bring the cellphone with you, so at least you can tell your brother it wasn't your fault :)

The Error of the Rooster

Mistake 1 and Mistake 2: Anyone who knows me knows that I don't have the stomach to kill an animal with an axe, or any other hand to hand combat weapon. If you are a person under 18, you should probably stop reading right ......here. If you are old enough to watch an R rated movie, keep on reading. So earlier in the day I took Alene to the barn to clean out horsies pen and to feed the chickens. During the chicken feeding the rooster flogged her, for the third time. I took her to the house assuring her he wouldn't live to see the moon. While she ate her lunch, I prepared the weapon of destruction and justice; my 12 gauge, which I am typically a hell of a shot with. After I put Alene down for her nap I went out to resolve the problem. Mistake 1; I threw Foghorn Leghorn out of the pen so that the rest of the poultry and the goats would not have to witness the swift justice of an irate stay at home mom. My dipshit dog, mack, who is scared of guns, kept running in front of the rooster. Obviously, this took away my advantage of shooting him in the open since dipshit ran all the way around the corner and under the barn for fear that I would cash in on some promises made after he dug holes under my fence. When mack was in the clear I positioned the trusty 12 gauge against my shoulder and took aim. Foghorn Leghorn has been around for 6 years, I have had a little bit of an attachment to the rooster. So at the moment of truth, I hesitated and flinched. Throwing off my aim. Something else was there I did not see. Mistake 2; After missing foghorn leghorn I quickly realized I blew the hell out of my main water line which runs down to the big barn."F*^%!!" After alot of cursing I realized that Leghorn was slipping around the fence to get back in, which would take quite a an effort to coax him back around the barn. So I quickly reloaded and took my shot. This could almost qualify for mistake three. I got him in the head, no suffering............but if you have ever killed a chicken before you will know that they flop around when you shoot them...........so down into the creek he went. A straight drop off into a bunch of nettles and black berries. So I swiftly went about fixing my water line, I am a shitty plumber, and then ran to the house, and got the rubber boots. After an assessment on which way would be the quickest to the creek, I decided to hop in, and grin and bear the nettles and blackberries. I found Leghorn, and pulled him out of the creek. I took Leghorn up the canyon as to be sure that he would not attract predators or stink up my house. So that is what this stay at home mom did today. In case anyone is curious, I fixed the water line!


* In the photo of the shot up waterline you see the obvious, holes from the shot. But if you look to the left, what appears to be a staple is actually chicken wire shrapnel

In the Beginning

I should probably introduce myself before I get started. My name is Sam, I'm not giving anymore than that. I grew up in Roseburg Oregon, graduated from Glide high school, went on to Linn Benton Community College in Albany and earned an associates degree in Animal Technology (a smaller version of Animal Science). As you will soon learn, punctuation and proper grammar are not a strong point to my writing base. Since college, I have worked for the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife (yes, I wrote some of those reports that you read) and Walgreens for a little while. While I was in college I worked for a rancher, a cabinet shop, an auction yard for a short period, and a title company. So now you have an idea of what I have under my belt. In 2008 I married my college sweetheart and in 2010 we welcomed our daughter into the world. A month after she was born she was diagnosed with cystic fibrosis, and torticolis (not that big of a deal and a spelling error).  We have our trials and tribulations with the cystic fibrosis, but I won't talk about that.  Because of the cystic fibrosis the doctors recommended that I stay at home with our daughter rather than going back to work. That way there is less risk of her becoming sick. I should also add that I have epilepsy because every now and then it might be brought up. With all of these small tasks, I became bored at home and decided to take on a new venture; Goat ranching. Please don't stop reading. I also raise cattle, which cancels out the goats, but not quite the horses, so technically I am at a negative 1 on the hobby farmer scale. Actually, I could be at a +2 on some hobby farmer scales, cows make money so they would make them a -. It has been suggested to me multiple times, from facebook, and friends that I post my little ventures on a blog. Ready to take on the challenge I agreed. I will do my best not to include my opinion on wolves, hippies and other varmins, but if somehow it shines through............that's just too bad. Hopefully I won't disgrace the family name with this little venture, and happy reading.