Timberwolf Legacies

Meet two of our farm hands: Aravis and Charlie. Aravis is the larger, tri-colored female. Her name comes from The Horse and His Boy by C. S. Lewis. Charlie is the puppy, though you can see in the second picture that he is now as big as Aravis. They are both purebred Australian Shepherds. They have strong, though often misguided, herding instincts which can sometimes be helpful. They've done an excellent jobs protecting our chickens from predators and bringing us lots of joy.

Anyone else take their goats and chickens with them on a weekend road trip? We are heading to my in-law's cabin in Indiana for the holiday and have the 8 goats loaded in the mini-van and the 11 chickens in a crate in the trailer. My husband will come later with the rest of the kids, the 2 dogs, and the cat. We lived on this property for 6 months during the summer of Covid while my husband and son built the cabin. We built a barn for the animals then. They've all grown up taking mini-van rides back and forth and are none the worse for the wear! I can't say the same for mini-van...

Meet our herd queens, Havah (black with wattles) and Silla (white). We've had these two since the summer of '20. I'd been wanting goats for a very long time and we were planning to spend the Summer of Covid on my in-laws acreage in Indiana while my husband and son built a cabin for them. Since we normally lived on 1/10th of an acre in the city, this seemed like the best time to experiment with goats.
I spent a long time researching breeds and chose Kinders to start with. Nigerian Dwarfs might have been a more logical choice given their size, but I'm not one to just do what everyone else is doing. Kinders are a dual purpose breed meaning they are good for meat and milk both. They have Nubian (big goats) and Pygmy (tiny goats) lineage making Kinders medium sized. We were also looking for a drinkable milk (I don't see myself making cheese any time soon). It turns out that milk taste has a great deal to do with breed. The larger producing goats tend to have less sweet, "goatier" milk. The smaller breeds produce sweeter milk with a higher butterfat content.
Regarding Kinder goat meat potential, well, I can't speak to that yet. I do hope to one day get into butchering our wethers (neutered males) for meat, but that's hard to imagine right now. While our animals are all have "jobs" on our little homestead, we kind of love them too.
Anyway, these girls are two now and we've really enjoyed them. Silla just kidded for her second time and Havah for her first. We are milking them each morning and are thoroughly enjoying the milk (we are having homemade goat milk ice cream tonight).