Belanger Jerry - Storeys guide to raising dairy goats: breed selection, feeding, fencing, health care, dairying, marketing

Not only can dairy goats provide milk and meat for a family, but their curiosity and typically gentle demeanor make them great companions as well.

P erhaps your heart has been captured by the antics of baby goats at play, or your self-sufficient spirit has lead you on a course toward finding a family-friendly source of fresh milk, homemade cheese, and maybe some nontraditional meat products. Whatever the inspiration, this book assumes that you are interested in goats but does not assume that you know anything about them. A good place to start the journey is the very beginning, with some basic terms and facts.

Female goats are called does or sometimes, if theyre less than a year old, doelings. Males are bucks, or bucklings. Young goats are kids. In polite dairy goat company, they are never nannies or billies, although you might hear these terms applied to meat goats. Correct terminology is important to those who are working to improve the image of the dairy goat. People who think of a nanny goat as a stupid and smelly beast that produces small amounts of vile milk will at least have to stop to consider the truth if shes called a doe instead.

Over the many centuries and generations that goats have been humankinds companions and useful domesticated stock, myths have been passed along that have their origins in goat behavior and characteristics. As myths tend to be, however, these are exaggerated truths or downright fiction.

Does are not smelly, they are not mean, and of course they dont eat tin cans. They are dainty, fastidious about where they walk and what they eat, intelligent (smarter than dogs, some scientists tell us), friendly, and a great deal of fun to have around.

Bucks have two major scent glands located between and just to the rear of the horns or horn knobs and minor ones in the neck region. Bucks do smell, but the does think its great, and some goat raisers dont mind it either. The odor is strongest during the breeding season, which usually runs from September to about January. The scent glands can be removed, although some authorities frown on the practice because a descented buck can be less efficient at detecting and stimulating estrus and will still have enough of an odor to be mildly offensive.

Still, even if they dont stink, bucks have habits that make them less than ideal family pets. For instance, they urinate all over their front legs and beards or faces. This is natural, but it tends to turn some people off.

In most cases the home dairy wont even have a buck (see ), so you can keep goats even if you have neighbors or if your barn is fairly close to the house, and no one will be overpowered by goat aroma.