We had our first vet trip yesterday. It was a good experience for my little farm kids. Every other problem we've dealt with we've treated ourselves or a good friend of ours made a house-call. This one pulled on my heart strings a bit. We love our sweet girl Stripe. Hears the back story.
A1 is almost 7 years old. Yep! For almost 7 years I've dealt with poop. A lot of poop. And most of it hasn't even been my own. As moms we know that it is inevitable. Well, after the 2nd child we know it's inevitable. Moms get pooped on. Mom's clean up poop in places other than a bottom. It smells, of course, but who else is gonna do it? You clean it up and move on.
If you cloth diaper then you deal with poop in a different way than if you use disposable. I've done both, and the money I save using cloth FAR outweighs the poop factor. Moms also know that poop can tell a lot about the health of your baby who can't communicate yet. Raise your hand if you've ever been worried about the color of poop or lack of poop. ME!!!
And then there's the tummy bugs. Nevermind. We'll pass on that one.
But in the past 9 months the poop has multiplied by close to 200. With all the animals here, we have all learned to "bask" in the poop. BASK not BATH! When we have visitors I will prepare them by saying, "there is a lot of poop! only dog poop in the immediate yard, but everywhere else there is lots. don't wear nice shoes if you're worried about it. and no shoes in my house. <<< PERIOD!" They laugh. And then their kids have poop on their shoes.
I've soaked and wiped poop off of a chick that had major "pasty butt". Every morning when I scrape the droppings board I observe and investigate all chicken poop for problems. We muck both stalls for our hoofed animals because no one likes to sleep in poop, including cows and goats. The poop we muck goes into a cart that gets dumped into the compost pile; which our chicken will scratch around and dust in (that's actually pretty gross). We mow over the stuff in our close yard and pastures because poop is fertilizer and we are hoping to be able to re-seed this way (an experiment that seems to be working well).
My children know about poop. We get it on our hands and wipe it on overalls. A1 is now very knowledgeable about poop. She has pointed out funny looking chicken poop and hunted out the one it belonged to. We treated that bird and now she's well. When we were bottle feeding Bella, Cassie, and Dartanian we were constantly trying to catch them in the act. 2 had scours, which is diarrhea (to keep it simple). It can be treated but the outcome isn't always good. Bella beat scours, Dartanian wasn't so lucky. RIP buddy.
Now back to Stripe. We went out to feed them and she didn't eat. She stood in the stall. She didn't even want her own bucket food. Goats will ALWAYS eat. I knew something was up. I put her in the yard and texted my good friend who "knows" goats. When I came back A1 says, "mom! this isn't good. this is NOT normal goat poop. It came from Stripe." Smart girl. We scraped it up, put it in a tupperware bowl, and hauled all of my human kids to the vet. The did a fecal float test to see what we were dealing with. WORMS. Well, shoot a high strength wormer down her and I'll tell you what, almost back to her old self in a matter of hours.
So if you have the desire to homestead and have animals, be ready. You will step in it, lay in it, touch it with more than a finger tip, and if you know how helpful it can be, you will be happy to be in close proximity to poop.
And that's the dirty truth.
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