In sickness and in health...

Tiberius has been ill. 

This one fact has dominated my and Ian's lives over recent days to the point where it is simply not possible to write about anything else. 

Tiberius, a goat who is capable of watching the back door for hours just in case Ian comes home, long after Sibelius has been distracted by his own reflection or wandered off to eat a falling leaf, has been bearing his illness in a typically stoic fashion: standing quietly in a corner with his head hanging down. Occasionally he moved his front and back legs closer together, hunching his back in what looked like a heartbreaking attempt to curl up around his poorly stomach.  Even more distressing was when he decided to lie down in the dirt with his head stretched out on the earth in front of him.  I thought we were going to lose him and reacted hysterically.

What happened?  Well, we think that on Sunday he managed to break into the temporary chicken house that's currently holding the smaller chicks and gorge himself on grower pellets.  Tiberius' obsession with chicken food is well known to us and for weeks we have been engaged in an arms race to build better defences as he learns how to break them down. On that particular Sunday we didn't see anything untoward happen, but in retrospect when I checked the small chicks that evening I was surprised by how much food they had apparently eaten.  We should have been more vigilant.

When we let him out on Monday morning Tiberius was clearly ill.  Although he has managed to snaffle pellets before, we have always managed to intervene before he has done anything more than give himself a small bout of diarrhoea.  This time it was spectacular.  A volcanic eruption of poo.  Even worse the rich pellets were now fermenting in his stomachs and producing gas.  Tiberius developed bloat, a painful build up of gas further exacerbated when his rumen bacteria began to die as a consequence of his not eating, and produced more gas.  Bloat can be deadly in ruminants.



A small goat with bloat

Unfortunately this all happened at the worse possible time for Ian, work-wise, and he was hit with the double whammy of guilt about not working when he was tending to Tiberius, and guilt about not being with Tiberius when he was working. 

'Tending to Tiberius' in our case consisted of us trying to administer a 'drench' as taught to us over a year ago on our goat husbandry course.  This was not the full blown stomach-tube technique, but an simpler, easier technique that mainly consisted of pouring the liquid down their throat.  The theory behind this is simple: first you open the goat's mouth, and keep it open, by inserting a finger into the gap between the front teeth and molars at the back of the mouth, then you tilt their chin back and pour in the liquid, shutting and holding the mouth closed to stop them spitting it out.

The practice - for us - most definitely was not.  It turns out that administering a drench to a calm and healthy goat, as we did on the course (with water), was nothing at all like attempting to do the same with a panicked and sick goat, who clearly just wanted to be left alone.  Trying to ignore the plaintive look in Tiberius' wide eyes, Ian enveloped him in a bear hug while I, hands shaking, tried to open his tightly clenched mouth.  It was difficult. In the snatched moments when we were able to pour the liquid into his mouth, he jerked his head and almost immediately dislodged the bottle occasionally letting out a heart-wrenching bleat.

We felt awful.  Mainly that our ineptitude was causing additional trauma to an already-distressed animal.  By the time it was dark, we had managed to pour a 100 mls or so of 'pro-rumen' into Tiberius, and several hundred more had been poured over his face and over our clothes where it dried to a sticky-sweet smelling mush whose smell followed us into the house as a reminder of our guilt. 

That night was sleepless and full of self-recriminations.  I didn't blame Tiberius, how could I expect him to know not to gorge himself on 'bad' food when it's not a character trait I possess myself? Every Christmas finds me lying on the sofa with a chocolate-induced stomach ache, the difference being that I don't have highly-evolved digestive system, including a rumen full of sensitive bacteria which is liable to being thrown out of whack by the occasional binge of rich food.

The following morning Ian was up at 4am and I joined him by the goat shed at 5.  We tried again to pour more medicine into Tiberius and tempt him into drinking some warm water.  However, we were now almost 24 hours into his illness and with no visible improvement overnight it was clear that more expert help was needed.   I called the vets.  They were wonderful.  Calm and professional, they had a stomach tube into Tiberius before he had time to blink. 

As I was leaving the vet commented it would be good to have me bring in a poo sample at some point in case the diarrhoea was being made worse by a heavy worm burden.  I motioned for him to follow me to the car and opened the boot, which, despite the use of a protective sheet, had suffered in the journey.  The vet stared in silence at the poo-plastered interior for a few seconds, taking in the splattered window, backs of the seats and wheel arches, and then visibly pulled himself together saying 'well, I'll just go and get a pot then!'  Luckily the vets were well provisioned with cleaning products, and Tiberius spent the journey home stood knee deep in puppy training pads.

As well as the wonderful vet, we were also supported by work colleagues, albeit somewhat bemusedly, as we both missed time from work to ferry Tiberius back and forth.  My office in particular is located between colleagues who both have children under the age of 1, and I like to think that we have reached a new level of camaraderie as we met each other coming and going from the office at odd times, or on one of our many trips to the kitchen for coffee to stave off the tiredness that comes from being awake since before dawn with our respective 'kids'. One of them also recommended an excellent baby monitoring app as something that could be extended to monitoring goats. 
On the other hand both Sibelius and Charles have reacted badly to our focus being elsewhere over the past few days.  Charles has started misbehaving in the house and I found him sitting on the sofa, something we thought we had trained him out of (whereas I am quite happy to sit amongst the fluff - possibly because I also leave lots of my hair around the place - Ian finally broke after leaving for work with hairy trousers yet again and decided there was only space on the sofa for a moulty human and not a moulty rabbit too).

Charles: part-time patent attorney

Similarly, Sibelius has become even more attention seeking than usual, flitting between trying to guzzle the medicine we were unsuccessfully trying to feed to Tiberius, and repeatedly slamming into him with a 'playful' headbutt.  At one point I was bending down when I heard the clatter of running hooves and suddenly found myself with Sibelius standing on my back like a noisy rucksack.  I didn't want to stand up too quickly and knock him off - a broken leg at this point would have pushed us over the edge- but slowly raising my torso resulted in Sibelius marching up my back to the new highest spot - my shoulders, where he pawed at my head with his front hooves as if to say - lift me to the leaves!  My white T-shirt still has a set of perfect muddy hoof prints.

Now, as we approach the end of day four, Tiberius has started tentatively eating again and the vets have passed the responsibility for his medication over to us.   We have been left with a newfound sense of responsibility for the animals in our care, and a still-raw realisation of the guilt that comes when our errors impact the lives of our herd, who we are very attached to.



Day three, feeling well enough to be a scamp.