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I didn't sign up for this, not the brutality of farming.

Warning: Soft hearted or squeamish might not want to read this. I don't want to write it.

All the goat websites tell me "you do not want to own a goat with horns". Goat dairy goat farmers all say that the goats should be dehorned, debudded, disbudded. They can be dangerous; goats fight each other and sometimes will gore each other; even a docile, friendly goat might hurt a person accidentally; horns get caught in fences; especially Billy goats get aggressive and may use their horns, etc.

So following the prevailing advice, I arranged to have the babies disbudded yesterday.

It was horrible, brutal, terrible. I cried. I shouldn't have watched. But I thought I needed to so I could learn to do it myself. Now that I've seen it done, I know that I could never do it myself.

I chose the disbudding iron method (all methods are horrible). It's like a soldering iron, but it has a ring on the end rather than just a point. The iron reaches over 2,000 degrees. It is heated up, then pressed for 7-10 seconds onto the base of the horn bud, which is a little larger than a dime. It sizzles and sputters, burning through the flesh to the skull. The baby screams, but I discovered it's worse when they don't scream. The woman who performed the disbudding (a goat farmer herself) does an extra step because, "every time I didn't the horn grew back". (Horns that grow back are called scurs. They can cause problems because they are deformed and can curl up, growing into the skull of the goat and must be either removed or trimmed regularly).

That extra step is to take the end of the iron and burn/dig the little nub of horn until it pops off. Horrible.

After the deed was done, we put the babies back in with momma. They were quiet. Dazed. But they did nurse a little. That seemed to comfort them.

When I went to let Hyacinth out to graze yesterday evening, the babies were perky. They were running and playing at top speed, climbing whatever they could find to climb, leaping into the air like little jack-in-the-boxes. So I thought all was well. The only sign they showed of possible pain was an occasional pause and quick shake of their head, like, "ow, what's up with that?" then they were off again.

This morning, everything was not rosy. Baby girl is standing kind of huddled and shivering. She didn't come out of the barn when Hyacinth was let out. I gave her a few hours to perk up, but when I checked on her this afternoon, she was the same. Her little horn spots are not clean and healing like Cosmos' are. The top of her head stinks. Cosmos' doesn't. I think she has an infection so I'm taking her to the vet in an hour.

In the pictures, you can tell which is Cosmos and which is Rose. Yes, that is skull that you are seeing.