Sadly, our buck Rocky now has a pretty bad injury on his leg, which has prevented him from performing his male-goat duties this last goat breeding round:
However, the group graciously allowed us to basically take over “ownership” of a buck graciously given to the group by some very nice friends of the group (all the bucks around here get used whenever needed). His name is Elvis, and he’s Lamancha, which is where we’ve been wanting to go with our breeds, and here he is:
A few weeks ago, I was in the house, and I saw Sue running back with the dogs that she had just taken up to the fields to let go in a fenced area to run around for the evening. She looked like she was in a hurry, so I stepped outside to see if something was wrong.
There was……rattlesnake! It was in one of our pecan tree areas. She had already let the dogs off the leashes, and they were the ones that alerted her to it with them barking at it, but thanks to God she was able to get them leashed up again and her and them out of there.
So, I went up there with a shovel and the shot gun. The rattler was tucked in a tuft of weeds, but finally I could see it. In trying to save a shotgun shell, I lunged at it with the shovel in an attempt to maim it, but all I did was end up covering it with the shovel head. Nice. And so that was that…I aimed the shotgun, and sent him packing.
Here’s brave Sue after carrying it back:
And its rattles:
Thanks to the Lord that all went well!
The next morning though, Sue had noticed Elvis was sitting in the goat shed opening, didn’t get up when she came that direction, but didn’t appear as if anything was wrong. It wasn’t until that evening that she discovered him limping pretty badly.
And then we discovered the cause — snake bite! The leg was swollen, you could see puncture marks, and some blood-stained fur around it. Oh no.
We wondered if it was the one we killed or another.
In researching snake bites, we read that if the goat doesn’t die in a few hours, there’s a good possibility it will live. Well, if he had been bit by the snake we killed, it was nearly 24 hours by then, so we were hoping and praying for the best.
Besides the external betadine, we gave him some activated charcoal in his feed, hoping that might help remove some of the toxins.
Over the first day or two, the swelling moved into his chest, and down his stomach, and on one of those days, he spent the day just sitting in the shed…we figured he just wasn’t feeling very well. 🙂
In the following picture, you can see the bite on his swollen left leg after we had drenched it with betadine:
At this point, a couple of days into it, he had an appetite, which we figured was good.
Today, thanks to God’s graces and mercies, Elvis is doing much better, and there’s only a little swelling on the leg! And we haven’t seen another rattlesnake since here.
Here’s a video documenting a couple days into it, a few days after that, and then almost three weeks after that (the day of this blog post, about 25 days since the bite):
We are very grateful to the Lord for sparing Elvis, and for granting him the healing He did! We pray Elvis will continue to be of benefit to the community!
— David
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