Goat of the Week: Introducing Ace the wether

This week the blog is focusing on wethers, so I decided to make Ace the Goat of the Week!

Ace is our most photogenic goat.
That's a nice way of saying he always tries to hog the spotlight.

We bought Ace for the 2011 San Joaquin County Fair in late February, early March of 2011. He is a boer goat wether that my sister purchased for market class.  This means that he would have been sold for meat at the end of the fair. 

Ace and Jordan are second in line. That is not where they placed.

Notice the "would have" in that last sentence?? Ace wasn't sold at the fair! He "made it out" because he became sick and stressed due to the heat and so we withdrew him from the fair (sick and stressed translates to tons of diarrhea). Why, you may ask? Well the first issue was we didn't know why he was sick during the fair. We made a guess that it was probably heat and stress, but because we didn't know for sure, we ethically couldn't sell meat that may be diseased. 

It was a decision that my sister had to make, because it meant she lost the initial $350 investment and the additional costs of feeding, and the large sale price. She became very attached to Ace, (who is an awesome goat with tons of personality) so the decision wasn't very difficult for her.

Happy sister, sick goat. Note that Ace is in his hot pink pjs.

As I will talk about more in my "Should I Raise..." series, wethers were a great starting point for us beginners.This was my sister's second time raising a fair wether. We learned a lot without a huge expense, time or long term commitment. For us, we now realize that raising wethers is just not for us (well, not for my sister), but it was a great introduction for us into raising goats. My sister plans to show breeding does for the first time this year, so we will have more new experiences to report soon!