Feeding Frenzies

Sometimes it seems like our lives revolve around feeding animals. We've fed cats for years, of course, and it was always easy...until we added a third cat, something we'd never had before. Now Irving has to be put in his isolation chamber (my sewing room) while Boot and Halley eat, or cat feeding time degenerates into a hissing mess.

Now, goats and horses don't hiss at each other, but it's also hard to feed them at the same time. We fill the goats' trays with grain and minerals, and set them outside the fence. Then we go in and feed Gus the horse in the run-in shed. If we put the goats' food down first, Gus will push them out of the way and eat it.

As you can imagine, the 'feed the horse first' regime doesn't win any popularity contests with the goats. This is the look I get coming back from feeding Gus.



Then it gets up close and personal, just in case I'm secreting goat food on my person. I rarely am.



There's a lot of loud maa'ing going on with this. I'm sure the neighbors think that we regularly chase the goats around with sticks, based on the cacophony at feeding time.

If we're lucky, the end result looks like this. If we're not, there are overturned trays, and a trip back up to the storage area for more grain.



And of course, when the goats finish, Gus comes out and licks the rest of the minerals off of the trays. He's not supposed to have them, but oddly enough, I haven't had much success explaining that to him.

We've actually gotten a lot better at feeding the animals. If you remember any of my early posts about feeding times, you'll sense a slightly less hysterical tone to this one. We're starting to feel like we know what we're doing, which of course means a painful lesson is just around the corner...