Judith Darlene Hammer

May 31, 1938 – August 8, 2023

Goats

We had a drought and sold off a lot of our cows. We also sent three trucks loads of bred cows to guy in far west Minnesota on a lease deal.

The next spring, we got a little rain and grew a lot of weeds. Tony thought goats might do good on the weeds. Tony had a friend over at Karval that was also interested in getting some goats. They found a guy in Oklahoma that had some nannies to sell. I think Tony and his friends each bought three hundred and twenty five. Tony got two guard dogs for the nannies. One time when the goats were out, some coyotes scared the goats and split them into three groups. Needless to say, the group without a guard dog lost some nannies.

When it came time for the nannies to have kids, we locked them up in a big feedlot we had. Sometimes there might be three or four nannies having their kids close to each other. There might be eight or ten kids and the nannies wouldn’t claim all of them so Judy and I would have some orphans. We got a bucket with ten nipples on it. Many times, we would have thirty orphans to feed twice a day.

Sometimes we would sell our kids at home and sometimes we would sell them at Colby, Kansas.

Our guard dogs were getting old. We heard about this guy that raised Anatolian guard dogs. He lived south of Branson, Missouri, in Arkansas. We drove our pickup to Silver Dollar City.  When we were ready to come home, we drove via Arkansas to buy a guard dog.

The dogs were full grown and hadn’t been handled very much. We picked out a tan colored one and put her in the back seat of our extended cab pickup. It was getting late and starting to rain. It rained on us most of the way home. We got home at 1:00 a.m. We dragged the dog into the back porch for the night.

The next morning, we took the dog out to the kidding pen. It was very muddy. Judy was sitting on a rubber tire water tank holding the dog’s long leash. I had to go check on something. While I was gone, the dog took off and Judy held onto the long leash. She was a muddy mess when I got back, and very unhappy. 

Next: Dog on the Loose

Part 7 was published October 9, 2023, and can be found here.