Dehorning (disbudding) baby goats..........

is no fun. Poor Telly, Chaps, James and me. I don't know who it hurt more. Physically it hurt the goats, emotionally it hurt me and James. Actually it wasn't quite as bad as I had anticipated. I've worried about this for a few days and had myself really dreading it. The whole idea of putting a red hot iron on a little baby's head and burning the hair and skin was more than I thought I could handle. Surprisingly, they didn't scream and squirm near as much as you would think they would. Yeah, they did scream, even when we were shaving around the little horn buds before burning. James did the holding while I did the burning. I could tell it was bothering James because he said, "don't you think that's long enough? How long has it been?" We all survived and I hope what we did did the trick. I hope nothing grows back because I'd hate to have remove anything else. If you look closely at Chaps you can see where I burned him in between the horns and above the eye. That's who I did first. I should be fired from this job. He looks like a mess and stinks pretty bad but he's ok. The babies are sleeping now. I think that wore them out. In another 6 weeks or so we'll be castrating. Don't worry, I probably won't post pictures of that.