Tuesday, March 22, 2011

News Flash

So we had a wonderful weekend weather wise, which ended with spending the afternoon Sunday with family for Rob's birthday!!  Nice way to end the weekend for sure.

On to new news.  The tom turkeys have been sparring to establish dominance and, well, we have a winner.  This would be the loser below, which is now in the roaster oven cooking.  The toms were really going at it yesterday, and this guy just got so beaten up.  The first picture is him still alive hanging upside down before the whole process.  He had so many cut marks and open sores on his head at this point from the other tom fighting with him.
We weighed him before we started, because I wanted to see what the difference was before and after.  He weighed 20 pounds before we started.

He weighed 14 pounds after being finished.  The scale says 13.6 on this measurement because his neck is leaning on the deck, but when the whole thing was on the scale it was 14 pounds even.  So there was 6 pounds of inners, feet, head and feathers.  Very interesting.  FYI, the trachea looked link those bendable straws, clear/white with ridges.  Very interesting.
As I said above, he is in the roaster now cooking and will let you know how he came out.  The turkeys are a little quieter now, as there is only 1 tom and 2 hens, so a little less gobbling.

Wait for it, drumroll please.............
New kid goats!!!!!  We got home last night after Liam's last hockey practice and Rob said he felt like he needed to check on the animals.  All was fine and we went to bed.  I got up this morning to work at 4:50 a.m. and went outside to grab some firewood as the house was cold, and heard a very high pitched bleat.  I was like OMG babies!!!  I ran back in the house and got Rob up and grabbed a flashlight (without waiting for Rob) and went out to the goat house.  For sure, Rachel had her kids!!!  They were both doing fine, still had mucous on them, which we wiped off with towels.  Rob tied off their umbilical cords with dental floss so they were less than 2 inches long and cut the rest off.  They are both males (I had to check, yep little ball sacs on both,  hahahaha).  Both of their ears are straight, yay!, no flipped up on the ends like Phoebe's and Monica's.  Rachel's ears are both straight, so perhaps that is why these were.
The kid on the left is a little bigger than the one on the right.  The one on the left is about 7 pounds and the kid on the right is about 6.  I love their brown faces.  :)  They nursed and are doing great, as is Rachel.
So adorable.  I think we are going to just go with R-1 and R-2 for names to keep them straight and then Phoebe's will be P-1 and P-2, and so forth for Monica.  I believe we will mark the inside of their ear with a permanent marker for now.  The plan is to sell them all.

In the next two days, we will need to cauterize their horns so they won't grow.  We will need to buy/borrow a hot iron to do this.  I believe we will castrate both boys, but need to check in the book we have as to when this needs to be done time wise.

Busy, busy morning!

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