When Your Goat Needs a Coat

Vinnie is not very far up in the herd order.  In fact, she’s sits at the bottom with every other goat above her.  That means she gets enough to eat, but she’s not got any extra fat.

She comes in to sleep in the barn, but she finds things to hide on or under.  She has rubbed off some of her fur trying to get into those tight places.  We’ve also had weird weather, so she really hasn’t developed a good winter coat, but she really needed one this weekend, so I went shopping.

I found a nice soft fleece jacket that zipped all the way up the front and didn’t have a hood.  It was the perfect coat!  I added a bit of elastic, and it was ready for Vinnie to try on.

Now Vinnie is little, but she doesn’t want me to touch her unless I have food, and then she’s my best friend.  I found her and caught her, and she screamed like I was killing her, and I finally got the coat on her.

It fit pretty good.  I did eventually get her other sleeve down where it belonged.  Here’s the back view where the elastic holds the coat from riding up.

There were a couple of things I didn’t count on though.  First, When Vinnie came out of the barn, the other goats freaked out. I really mean this.  They fled from her in terror.  Her mom and twin sister (in the back below) were the two worst.  They would run from her.  She’d try to get close to them.  They’d run some more.

The others were almost as bad.  For someone who is usually getting picked on and forever running from the other goats, I think she finally got to a point where she enjoyed this new-found power to make the big bully goats run from her.

Look at those ornery eyes.

I decided to feed the goats their grain a little early to try and distract them from the terror of Vinnie.  Face it, goats really love their food.  The coat worked a miracle for her at feeding too.  Look, she’s eating from a pan by herself and the others were carefully avoiding her instead of shoving her aside.

Finally, a couple of them got brave enough to check her out.

Sally even got brave enough to try and start bullying her again.  Darn!

Notice in the picture above how the coat hangs low in the back.  Well, that’s the second problem.  It’s really problematic when she jumps up in the manger where she wants to eat and sleep.

If she gets a back foot in there, she stumbles and pulls and eventually the coat comes off.  She was curled up sleeping peacefully in her warm coat when I checked her in the middle of the night, but when I went out this morning she was shivering again.

Poor Vinnie.  I picked the coat up and washed it and then I added a couple of pleats down at the bottom, so she shouldn’t have that problem again.

It’s not supposed to be near as cold at night now.  She’s fine once the sun comes out and warms things up a bit.  Hopefully, she won’t need it any more this winter.

Snickers says that he’d be happy to keep the coat.  I couldn’t hardly get him off of it to make the alterations.

Linking to Homestead Barn Hop.

Linking to Macro Monday.

Linking to Pets Forever.

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