A Long Sigh

I despair of ever selling my goats.

I'm down to four left: Trigun, Summer, Lyric, and Tamarack. I sold Jupiter last week but she won't actually leave the property until July. 

There's a glut of goats on Craigslist right now. Everyone in my area is selling, but very few people are buying. And even fewer people are buying goats that are priced $200 to $400 like mine. :-/ Doesn't help that neither Trigun or Summer are milking, so buyers are pretty quick to pass them by for the poor quality, horned goats  that are already in milk (a grand 1/2 gallon a day; woopdeedoo) and only $100 on CL. 

I've posted my herd for sale again and again. I've offered to trade them dozens of times, I've dealt with flakes and people who somehow got the idea that all the goats were milking (despite the fact that I clearly said they weren't). It's been two months and still nothing... The goats sit in the barn almost the whole day, eating hay and wasting even more. Expensive hay. Even if Trigun and Summer were milking, I would still be every bit as anxious to get them sold. I have no room in the fridge for goat milk, so it's all going straight to the chickens. That, and I'm still milking with only my right hand, since the left one goes kaput when I try using it; so if they were milking, I would be forced to dry them up since I can't handle handmilking right now. 

Now comes the killer part: There are so many excellent cows for sale on Craigslist right now that I almost want to cry; knowing that I can do nothing except sit on my hands and watch them pass until the goats sell. There was a Jersey/Brown Swiss cross, a Jersey/Hereford cross, a Jersey/Guernsey cross, a Jersey/White Park cross (I love Jersey crosses!), three Dutch Belteds, a Guernsey/Holstein cross, three purebred Jerseys, a Swedish Red, and two Milking Shorthorns. 

If the goats would only sell then I could have my pick of any of those cows!! I've contacted the sellers of almost all those cows, asking if they would be interested in trading their cow for my goats... I always get the same response: A snort of amusement that I would think that they would even WANT goats, and then a polite refusal. They're moving so they can't have goats, or they just got a divorce so they're trying to thin their numbers, or they're trying to cut back before summer comes and the pasture dies back, or they don't have the fencing to keep goats in... I've come to expect a refusal every time, but I still try. If you don't ask, then the answer will always be "No". So therefore I still try. Someone somewhere in this huge world, has GOT to want four goats, right!?

Going out to the barn now has become something of a painful experience. I look at those four goats and wonder if I'm going to be stuck with the hay burners forever. If I'm going to have hay burners then I'd like it to be a pair of caramel colored Pygmy's; not four whopping Nubians who seemingly have hollow legs. But meanwhile I have to keep shelling out money to buy hay for goats that I don't even want here. And it hurts.

But it seems that there's not much I can do about the situation... I can't order a buyer from a catalog and pay 3-day shipping to get them here. I can only wait, hope, complain a little bit *wink*, and give a long sigh as I throw hay into the manger.

Gosh those were nice cows on Craigslist...