Watercolor Baby Goats Christmas Cards

Cute Baby Goats - Watercolor Christmas Cards Adorable Watercolor Baby goats in 8 styles for Christmas Card exchanges

Watercolor Baby Goat Christmas Cards
by GetYerGoat™ Gifts for Goat Lovers

Adorable Goat Princess Birthday Card and Postage

As many of you  know, yesterday was my precious BabyGirl's 15th Birthday - her birthday photo was So cute I decided to make it into a birthday card and postage for  anyone who desires to purchase it. :) She is a one of a kind little goat - a miracle goat too - (for those of you who have not yet read her story, Please  take a moment to see why she is so special)  Her name is BabyGirl and her story is Here  make sure to follow all of the links at the pink flowers bottom of each page to see her entire story - you will be glad you did :)
Well on to the cuteness delight of the birthday card I  created :

Goat Princess Happy Birthday Card by getyergoat
Browse more Goat Cards

The text is customizable, so if you like to use it for something other than a birthday - feel free to change the text :)

Goat Shower Curtains by GetYerGoat

Goat Lovers Shower Curtains

Are these cool or What?  I just love them..

This is just a sample of the cute goat shower curtains we now offer at our Cafepress shop - These cute unique shower curtains  are for the ultimate goat lover- you won't find these at Bed Bath and Beyond!

Goat Shower Curtains by GetYerGoat

Fly Control, Fly Predators in the Goat Yards.

Just got done sprinkling my fly predators out in the goat yards..  the goats followed me thinking I was  giving treats..  and every time I threw a handful they ran to where I tossed them to find.. NOTHING.. LOL They think I'm a meanie. This is my first year with fly predators.. I hope they work. I'd love to leave my back door open and I have no screen on it. I hate flies. (For already emerged adult flies you will have to use fly traps till the predators start killing off all the larvae)

Quick Fly Control Instructions

Wait! Don’t release your Fly Predators until you see a dozen moving around. They are shipped in the pupal (cocoon) stage which are the little black things. Normally they’ll start emerging within 2-7 days after arrival in summer, (later when cooler) but it’s OK if they’re emerging on delivery. They look like tiny little ants with wings. Like this When its cool, keeping them in a warmer area (80-85°F) will speed up their emergence. When it’s hot keep them under 100°F and out of direct sunlight while in the bag.
After emergence starts, release them in the next day or twoas holding them longer than 5 days after that may reduce their effectiveness. Sometimes they are quite stinky, but that does not indicate a problem. Call if none have emerged on the 7th day after delivery in summer (14th day when high temps are 72°F or less). We guarantee live delivery and will replace if necessary.
Release your Fly Predators where pest flies are reproducing. This is often not where you see the adult flies. Sprinkle them out near all areas where there is, or was, fresh manure (or other rotting organic matter) that remains moist. This is where flies reproduce and Fly Predators find and kill them at the pupal stage. Fly Predators themselves do not need or eat moist manure, so don’t leave some behind for them. It’s best to remove all manure or spread it to get it dry within 5 days.
Put Fly Predators out proportionally to how much manure or rotting organic matter is in each area. Put some near the manure corner of corrals, the pasture rough areas, the manure pile as well as arenas and dry lots. Put them along fence lines or places where they won’t get stepped on. For the barn leave 5-10% in the bag and hang it in breezeway.
Fly Predators can travel up to 150 feet, but it’s better to get them within 50 feet of fly breeding areas. Flies can’t reproduce in dried manure or feed, so don’t put Fly Predators there. Even if you muck out daily, put some where manure was if the spot is kept moist from urine. Flies reproduce in rotting vegetation as well as manure. Put Fly Predators near any spoiled hay, feed, round bale feeders, grass clippings, etc.
Try to dry up moist areas such as near water troughs, leaky faucets, under stall mats, etc. Wetter than normal weather usually produces more flies. In that case add more Fly Predators to keep control.
Watch Out for ants, birds and chickens all of which will eat the pupae that Fly Predators are in at arrival. If you have free range chickens or ants put the Fly Predators in open sacks hung off the ground. Hiding them in grass can help with birds.
Keep pesticide sprays away from Fly Predators They are much more sensitive to pesticides than pest files. If you have to spray a horse do it away from any fly breeding area; i.e. not in the stall. If you use a residual spray apply it only to pest fly resting areas (a sunny wall, ceiling rafters) avoiding pest fly reproduction areas (manure, rotting vegetation). Fly Predators will only be found in the reproduction areas.
Fly Predators stop pest fly reproduction but do not affect existing adult flies. It takes about 30 days from first release to see a difference if you start after the pest flies populations have built up. If the fly pressure is great, use double or triple the normal Fly Predator quantity for the first few months to catch up and aggressively reduce adult flies as quickly as possible. For every adult fly you see, half of them will be females who can lay 900 eggs during their 21 day lifetime. Stopping this reproduction quickly helps your Fly Predators gain back control.
To get adult flies you can use traps, sticky paper or bait as these will not harm Fly Predators. Pick the right trap for the kind of flies that are bugging you. Most traps are for House Flies. If you have biting Stable Flies (found typically on legs and cause stomping) get a biting fly trap. Put attractant traps (usually water filled) away from your house or barn as these draw flies from a wide area. Sticky traps don’t draw from a wider area and are OK in barns, but need to be in bright areas. Wide area spraying is often counter productive as it will decimate the Fly Predators and other beneficials so the pest flies will build up even faster without any natural control.
Flies travel 1/4 mile or more so if neighbors have animals suggest they use Fly Predators too or put some of yours there.
Good manure management makes a huge difference. The less manure there is on the property, the less flies you’ll have. Do the best you can to remove it, dry it or concentrate it into one area. If you see a reduction in flies, but still have too many, try 50-100% more Fly Predators for a month or two.

Google Brings The Damn Goats Back

 I guess it's hard to remember when goats were an oddity.. I used to live less than a mile from where Google is located now,  I moved from CA long before Google existed.. :)  But it pleases me to see Google is using goats for brush clearing- Promote the Goat™

Go Green Go Goats by getyergoat
Many shirt designs available at zazzle

Google Brings The Damn Goats Back: "Jack McKenna
TechCrunch.com
Thursday, April 15, 2010; 4:19 PM

Google is bringing the goats back this year to keep the grass cut and to provide an excellent opportunity to show that they care about the environment. We made fun of them last year, and even tried to get PETA all riled up about goat's rights. Mostly because it seems the transportation and feeding of the goats sort of offsets the carbon savings from mowing the lawn, making this all a big PR stunt. But MG managed to get three posts out of it, including video with the goats. Sadly he's currently on vacation in Japan, so this will likely conclude our breaking Google goat coverage until next year. Our only hope is that Google eventually genetically engineers the goats to be all black in honor of Earth Day."









PETA On The Google Goats: Let Them Eat Grass (But They Need Perks)
Following up on our story about the hilariously absurd use of goats to mow the lawns around Google’s headquarters instead of lawnmowers, we were able to get a comment from PETA, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals. PETA is okay with letting the goats be goats (eating grass and looking cute), but they have some major concerns about how they’ll be treated in doing these tasks.
Says Amy Cook, an Assistant Manager of Marketing for PETA:

PETA has no problem with letting goats do what goats want to do (e.g., look cute and eat weeds), but we do have concerns about how the goats may be transported, whether they are provided with access to shelter during storms and shade as well as water during hot weather, where they are housed when they aren’t “working,” what kind of veterinary care they receive, and what becomes of old and/or excess goats. PETA has found over and over that whenever animals are used by a business to make money, corners are cut and animals often suffer as a result. And that really gets our goat, if you’ll pardon the pun.

Read more:

Google Rents Goats To Replace Lawnmowers (I'm Not Kidding)

In what absolutely reads like an April Fools joke, Google has a post on its blog today explaining how it has rented a herd of goats to replace the lawnmowers that normally cut the grass in the fields around its headquarters. This is Google’s “low-carbon” approach to maintaining its property.
Google is renting the goats from a company called California Grazing. Apparently, every so often a herder will bring about 200 of them to the campus and they’ll roam around for a week eating the grass. Not only that, these goats will fertilize the land at the same time — yes, that way.

Read more:

It's hard for me to remember when I was a city girl living not far from the Google Headquarters (LONG before Google was there)  and thinking  how weird it would be for GOATS of all things to be in the city  eating  what is natural to them.. I mean we only see them at petting zoos in the city right?  I find it funny now having raised goats for 18 years and  not thinking  what my life would be without them.. I love it..

Goat Grand National - Goat racing at it's Best

High-level goat racing from the UK. This video is just too cute not to pass on to my readers! Very Clever way to Promote the Goat™ Enjoy! Complete with tiny stuffed jockeys on their backs ;)

Crossbreeding goats and sheep Equals a GEEP

Crossbreeding goats and sheep
It looks like a zookeeper's prank: a goat dressed in a sweater of angora. But the odd-looking creature that appeared on the cover of the journal Nature last week is no joke. The animal is a crossbreed of two entirely different species, a goat and a sheep. Inevitably, it has been dubbed a geep.
Now 18 months old and thriving, the geep was produced by the latest tricks of embryo manipulation. Scientists at the Institute of Animal Physiology in Cambridge, England, mingled new embryos from both sheep and goats when each consisted of no more than four to eight cells. Ultimately, these were placed in the wombs of surrogate sheep or goat mothers and allowed to grow to term. Such hybrids are called chimeras (after the mythic monster with a lion's head, goat's body and serpent's tail).
Because each embryo came originally from the fertilized eggs of both a goat and a sheep, the animals had four parents.
The Cambridge experimenters produced a total of six animals with characteristics of both sheep and goats. Only one of them, however, had blood proteins from both species. That animal behaves like a goat and has even tried mating with female goats, but like another hybrid, the mule, its sperm are defective. At Justus-Liebig University in Giessen, West Germany, other embryo manipulators also reported producing goat-sheep.
Though such experimenting is sure to trigger debate, scientists point to practical benefits: it should make it easier to rear embryos of endangered species in the wombs of other species or even create hybrids as valuable as the indomitable mule.

Read more: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,921546,00.html#ixzz0jVovFj4l

GetYerGoat™ Goat Lovers Products & Goat Gifts: Happy Easter Goat Cards: Zazzle.com Store

GetYerGoat™ Goat Lovers Products & Goat Gifts: Happy Easter Goat Cards: Zazzle.com Store: "Happy Easter Goat Greeting Cards- Inspired by my own goats - we bring you Easter Goats! Our Famous Don't Eat the Brown Jelly Beans Goat Easter cards with a variety of goat breeds- as well as Easter Baby Goat in the Egg- Fun goat Easter Cards. We have many goat breeds with Easter Baskets - Baby's First Easter with our very cute and popular Easter Egg Baby Goat."

Easter Baby Goat Egg by getyergoat
Create custom note cards with zazzle.com

Happy Easter Fainter (Myotonic) Goat by getyergoat
Shop for a greeting card with zazzle

Seasonal Reminder for Our Goat's Safety

Winter Precautions for our Goats Well Being

It never seems to matter whether we are newbie goat owners or seasoned goat owners, we ALL make mistakes and sometimes these things are at the cost of a beloved goat's life. (And believe me girls and boys, it is ALWAYS a favorite)
Three Things I want to remind everyone of this winter:

• 1. Do NOT use heat lamps in your barns, and do NOT close the goats up completely in the barn where they cannot escape in case of the "dreaded barn fire" .. Many of us are having kids born in winter and have our does and newborns locked in kidding stalls or the goats locked in a closed barn to keep them warm OR worse, using heat lamps to keep babies or goats warm. Please don't. Even the heat lamps with guards on them can get knocked off and start a fire and I hear far too many horror stories each year of screaming goats and goat owners who are hysterically watching and listening to their beloved goats die in fires. Instead keep the barn open and maybe put low boards to keep the ground air off the goats (so they be stepped over) ONLY if there are NO tiny kids who wouldn't be able to step over them.. Keep a thick layer of bedding straw of grass hay for them to lay down into and warm water so they do not lower their body temperature drinking cold water. Grass hay in the gut keeps them much warmer than grain, keep this in mind , if you feed grain feed this in the morning and grass hay in the night feeding.


• 2. Make sure the ice is kept off the water trough or buckets and the water level is to the top so the goats do not have to bend way down to drink (this avoids the dreaded knocked into the water and ice drownings that can happen. Try to keep smaller lower water for the small kids and goats- more than one water bucket/trough is good so they do not fight over who is drinking.
  
  and the last warning .. comes in the form of a pitiful email I received just today from a very sad goat owner.


• 3. While many of use pasture the goats during the warm months - and bring the goats in for hay feeding in the cold months, DO NOT be tempted to use Hay Nets or Bags- they are dangerous and can (More often than you would think) hang your most beloved goat. If you have No feeders for your hay, you are Far better off feeding on the ground than using a hay net even for one or 2 goats.

In Loving Memory of Marcia's Sweet Tippi

Dear goatlady,
PLEASE help me get the word out to other fools like me who used a hay net to feed their goats. We have been using one for almost a month. At 9:15 this morning I got a call from my neighbor that one of our goats appeared to be down. I rushed to the barn and found our darling Tippi dead. She had strangled herself in the hay net, there was little sign of struggle, and the net wasn't very far off the ground. My husband had been to the barn shortly before and everyone was fine.
We love all our goats, but Tippi had been ours since birth. She was born sick and was VERY touch and go for the first month of her little life. Tippi was our baby,having grown into a happy healthy 8 month old nubian/boer X doe with blue eyes, who loved to be held. Every precaution had been taken to keep our girls safe, and because of my STUPIDITY in thinking this was a way to keep their hay clean, our precious little one is gone. To lose any of them this way would be heartbreaking, but I'm not coping with losing Tippi well at all, The guilt is overwhelming. I haven't been able to stop crying since it happened. We are fairly new to small livestock and NONE of the hay net manufacturers put out of warnings of any kind. The site I purchased it from had them listed in the general livestock section.
Tippi paid a terrible price for my ignorance and tears can't bring her back, but maybe someone else might stop before making the same horrendous mistake I did if they read this.
So, So Sorry....
Marcia

I want to say to Marcia .. My heart aches for you.. I am SO Very Sorry, and I appreciate you sharing this story with me - Beloved Tippi may have saved another precious goat's life.

Sad Times For Goat Owners

This last week has been especially sad for some of my friends and their goats- Personally I lost one of my favorites on Thanksgiving eve. My Bubba was 13 yrs old and his loss leaves an emptiness in my heart that is difficult to describe.
Bubba's classic handsomeness is the focus of many of my goat T-shirts, goat greeting cards, and other goat gifts. He is also the handsome goat in my Cafepress GetYerGoat Shop Logo. He has often been the butt of many jokes, and was the neighborhood mascot, everyone who visited my farm met Bubba and all thought he was a handsome boy. He was sweet and talked to me every day- he was a fence jumper and was constantly getting my attention outside to put him back in the goatyard. I miss sweet Bubba and all of his antics, he will always have a special place in my heart.

My dear friend Judy in Alaska has been battling an untreatable ailment with one of her favorites, her absolute favorite, Jeep, and has made the extremely difficult decision to have him euthanized today- My heart love and prayers go out to her and her sweet Jeep.

And yet another blogger friend the Purple Goat Lady, She lost her favorite mama goat and her last born babies .. my love and hugs to her as well.

Non goat owners sometimes wonder how we can get so attached to our goats- they become pets and family just like a beloved dog cat or in some cases children. :) Losing beloved goats is a pet loss that is as hard on the emotions as anyone else we lose.