Comment by ErroneousBosh
5 hours ago
> Modern sheep grow their wool continuously, but that took a while to breed in.
No they don't.
In the summer their wool starts to grow out much thinner, like maybe a quarter as thick - it's really noticeable. This gives what's called a "rise", a gap between the sheep's skin and the thicker coarser wool. Once that's high enough to get shears (or these days, machine clippers which are like a big beard trimmer) into you can shear the fleece off.
If there's no rise you haven't a hope in hell of cutting it.
If there's a good rise it practically falls off.
If you leave them long enough or if the rise starts growing in too soon, they'll start "casting" where their wool just falls off in big chunks. This is actually quite dangerous for them because it's itchy and they roll on their backs to scratch, and get stuck upside down with their legs in the air and suffocate.
And you thought sheep farming was easy and fun ;-)
I thought animal farming in general is an arcane science.
My friends have goats but they aren't farmers and they haven't got a clue how to care for them. The females sometimes are left with milk in their breasts after their young are weaned and one of my friends will get anxious about that and ask us to help her milk them. It's impossible. You can't milk a goat that doesn't want to be milked. If you push them too hard they lie down so you can't reach their teats and that's that unless you want to have three people lifting the goat up and another one trying to milk her while she squirms and kicks. I don't trust the milk either. Once in a while they succeed in milking a goat and when I tried the milk (after boiling it) it was sort of gritty, like it was mixed with sand. It was not impurities from the environment because I filtered it through a muslin so I think the animal may have had some infection like a mastitis or something that affected the milk's texture.
I bet farmers know exactly what to do about all that or probably they know how to get the animals used to milking when they're still young so that the won't resist it that much. I've watched videos of goats being milked and it looks almost effortless when a pump is used. The goats just line up in their feeding trays and then someone walks up to them from behind, pumps out their tits and moves to the next one, bish bash bosh. My friends don't even have a dedicated structure to feed the goats, we just throw hay for them on the ground so they end up fighting.
My friends really have no idea how to care for the goats, it's rather sad. The owner of the farm has even said he wants to get "wild" goats that don't need to be cared for. By that he means a herd of goats that have gone feral and roam the hills in a village nearby. He thinks because nobody actively cares for them and the herd persists that must mean the goats are somehow self-sufficient. I think that's a big misunderstanding. Domesticated animals need a lot of care one way or another.
I think I'd prefer to have sheep though, if I had animals. Sheep look much nicer than goats.
I absolutely love goat's milk and I would love to keep goats, but they are every possible kind of a pain in the tits to deal with.
A neighbour of mine had a goat that we thought had some terrible thing happen because she was choking and gagging and frothing at the mouth like some cartoon rabid animal. Nope, far simpler. She'd eaten a grey lycra-and-elastic sports bra off the washing line, got a bra strap hooked over her tongue, and the rest of the bra down her throat. Hooked the strap with my finger, pulled it out in one quick deft rather unpleasantly squelchy motion, and ten seconds later you'd never have thought there had been anything wrong with her.
The bra went in the bin.
Bloody goats.
Your friends either need to learn how to care for goats - if only there was some world-wide repository of knowledge with books and videos and stuff! - or give them a good home somewhere else. They're probably hard to milk because as you say they're not used to being handled, and it may be too late to do that by now. If that's the case, you may never be able to milk them no matter how you handle them, and maybe you can breed from them, or maybe you can give them a nice new home, cosy and fragrant, along with some onion, garlic, ginger, cumin, coriander, and chilli, with a kilo or so of spinach too.
As an aside, you probably want to get yourself a copy of "Self-Sufficiency" by John Seymour, and have a read of that.