The day after I posted the pictures of our farm animals, proclaiming Yolanda as the Queen of the Barnyard, she died very unexpectedly.
know it isn’t nice to choose favorites, but she was my favorite goat. In all honesty, we don’t even know what happened to her. She went from a tiny bit ill, to extremely sick, to dead in just a few hours.
We rushed her to the vet, and they started IV fluids and a few other things, but really, by that point, it was too late. We were devastated. I spent my drive home bawling my eyes out.
I had to tell the guy I bought her from, and he was really upset about her passing as well. He had been giving me advice over the phone about how to care for her when I saw her collapse in the field.
Since Yolanda died, we have spent the past week researching every plant in our pasture, trying to find what could have caused such a sudden illness. We thought for awhile that we had figured out the culprit, but most of my research indicated that the plant we thought we had is most common in England.
A call to the County Extension Agent revealed that he had never heard of a livestock death from such a plant in our area. Now we wonder if maybe she contracted an acute case of coccidiosis or barber pole worms.
The harsh reality is, that we may never really know what took our sweet goat away. We have done everything we can to protect the other two, but all I can do now is watch them closely and pray for their well being. I’ll close with a picture of her that sums up her personality.
