The anecdotes from our East Austin correspondent The Wacissa Kid may sound like tall tales, but Sleeping Horse Pills can assure you that it is simply another case of facts that are indeed stranger than fiction. Some of you may remember our review of "Dust Takes Root", a cassette of The Kid's music project The Unpopular Plant Series in issue #2 of Sleeping Horse Pills.
Chuco and Taco are two goats who live in harmony with Bob the dog and a smattering of fowl on Jason's East Austin sanctuary of awesomeness. What follows is a tale of violence, compassion, suspense and the sexual organs of farm animals.
CABRITO CASTRATO by The Wacissa Kid
Some things you should know about my goats:
When they scream, it sounds like a child screaming. Urgently.
As teenagers, they were incredibly destructive. They still are.
They like to drink their own pee, and the look on their faces after says 'God, that was awful! I think I'll do it again....WTF?!', all rolled into one.
They like to climb on things, like cars, chicken coops, and I'm pretty sure they've looked longingly at the roof of my house.
Chuco, the one this story is going to be about, learned to say my dogs' name, Bob, while he was trying to mount him. He also blows in Bob's ear.
This is not about Bob, but Bob likes this at times.
They have both attempted to hook up with the possibly hermaphroditic rooster, a gift from my pal Luke.
They peed on him, because that is what goats do when they're hot for you and you can't give them what they need.
The rooster, not Luke.
All this stems from the testosterone coursing through their goatly veins. In short, they are being goats in the place I have provided for them. I haven't done the best job, having underestimated the strange intelligence of goats, but it's been irritating, fun, shocking, and disgusting. I recommend it.
I really did think this was the best option. It was that, or kill and eat them.
Give them away on Craigslist?
Believe me, I've seen lots of 'give-away' ads on craigslist for billy goats and I'm sure most end up in the pot.
Castrating them seemed like a better way.
I had never done this before; actually, I neutered a cat once, but under supervision and the cat was sedated. Precedent.
Let me outline three of the methods I found on the internet.
Across the spectrum of goat-related sites and advice columns, they stayed consistent.
- Burdizzo
This involves a screwed-up looking metal clamp-thing that you use to crush the cord inside the goats' testes without breaking the skin or cutting anything off. This stops the blood flow, and they atrophy and shrink up.
I didn't go this route because I couldn't find one, and I didn't want my goats to have pendulous empty flagons hanging from their nethers.
Banding Method
This involves stretching an industrial-strength rubber band around their balls and leaving it there until they fall off.
I bought one, and a package of the little doughnut-shaped bands, but their balls were too big to fit through the device...any dudes out there in need of such a thing?
The Knife Method
This is performed without anesthesia, and somehow goats don't die from it. You squeeze the testes as far up as you can, and then cut off the bottom 1/3 of ball sack. The balls pop out, you yank them out to expose the cord, and then, instead of a nice clean cut, you're supposed to saw back and forth creating a ragged wound which will close up better than a clean one.
I have no idea why this sounded like something I should do.
So, I went with the Knife Method. I had cut a cats' balls off once, and that wasn't so bad, so why should this be any different?
I decided on a fillet knife that had never been used.... for precisely that reason.
Wound-closure powder from a first aid kit, and a 3ml syringe filled with tetanus vaccine rounded out the needed equipment.
I had two people to help me restrain the goat during the procedure, and I am thankful for that and to them, in volumes. Don't ever attempt this without someone to help you.
We made sure that the rubber-band contraption wouldn't fit, like one ball at a time or something, but it was a no-go.
I sterilized the area with hydrogen peroxide, gathered up something resembling courage, and cut the weird, callused end off of Chuco's ballsack. There wasn't any blood, and the yell he let out didn't seem comensurate with what I had just done. The elongated white lemons posing as his testicles popped right out in the open.
Holy crap, there was no going back now.
The idea was to pull them out and cut the cord.
I grabbed the first one, I think it was the left, and tugged. Not only was it slippery as hell, but it seemed pretty entrenched. Like trying to wrestle an oyster. Have you tried that? It isn't easy.
So I got as much as I thought I could, and then attempted to do the 'ragged sawing' motion advised by the goat-related community; this did not work.
My knife lore is probably not what it should be, but somehow, the sleek blade of the fillet knife just didn't do anything that wasn't clean through.
So I cut them clean through, left then right.
Some blood came out after the second one, but I dusted it with wound-stop powder to clot the blood and seal the wound. And it looked like it was working.
We started to let him go and suddenly the blood just started flowing! Crazy red, like nail polish when first applied; wait, no, nail polish is just like fresh blood, crazy red...anyways.
By this time he was pretty quiet, and his eyes were actually closed. I started thinking I would have to kill and dress a goat that evening, something I was not planning on, nor totally prepared for.
The wound kept bleeding, not heaving arterial pumps, but steady-as-she-goes out onto the wood.
There wasn't any more wound-closure powder, but I remembered hearing that corn-starch was a good clotting agent, so Luke ran over to his house and got some.
We dusted that poor goats' injury thoroughly. And it kept bleeding.
I was trying to prepare myself for the eventual need to end his life when we all decided that we should let him up and have a go at it before we decided anything.
We released the poor creature, and he slowly got up and then delicately climbed up the rock retaining wall in my yard and then made his way to the chicken coop where he stood in the corner and sulked.
It's true, goats can sulk.
There was a little trail of blood where he had been, but nothing excessive. Whatever that means.
After gathering ourselves a bit, we checked on him in the coop. He had a look on his face that said 'fuck you guys!' and he looked pretty put out by the whole thing. He was still dripping a bit, but not pouring like when we had him on his side, so it was decided he'd probably live.
The next big decision was what to do with the balls themselves; fry them up and eat them, throw them away, or give them to Bob, the dog.
I sure as hell didn't have any appetite after that, and nobody else did either, so I decided Bob should have a go at what had been having a go at him for so long.
There was a little bit of hairy skin left out in the yard, but since I don't know anything about tanning leather and it was so small, I left that one for yard-creatures.
People keep asking me why I didn't make something out of it, but really, it was tiny. Maybe large enough to make a cozy for a dog's nose if you stretched it.
I put the balls in Bobs' bowl, say that three times fast if you please, and we stepped back to see what he'd do. He gently picked them up in his mouth, and then just dropped them on the floor like the sad corpses of miniature seals that have been clubbed to death and left on the beach.
Gross.
I threw them over the fence into the woods, knowing Bob would find them in a few days, perfectly aged. That's just how some dogs roll.
By the next morning, Chuco was still sulking in the chicken-coop, but looked fine and had stopped bleeding entirely. There didn't seem to be any infection, and one never developed.
He has made the sort of recovery that I wanted; healed and active, but not like before.
Less horny, less destructive, not as covered in his own pee. He is also a little more wary of human beings.
Now, he stares silently from the roof of the car as Taco tries to do what he no longer can.
You could read a lot into that look, really.
So, I know this happens daily on farms all over the world in some fashion or other, but at times I still feel like I did something pretty fucked up. I mutilated an animals' genitals.... damn.
Granted, it wasn't out of anger, and it saved him from the dinner-table, but still.
I think that now, as the destruction of my yard has lessened somewhat, I feel better about it,
even okay. Not so sure I'd do it again. There has to be some kind of negative psychological impact from cutting off goat-balls on a regular basis, and I don't want to find out what it is.
Thank you,
The End.
