The Quarantine Pen

The quarantine pen has been constructed using 2,400mm star posts, 4mm white wire and 2000mm chicken wire. Each pen is 6m x 3m with a 500m wide gate.

There are two of these, side by side, with the gates sitting side by side (to make it easy for me to access). Across the back half of the pen I have also attached 70% shade cloth so that they have some decent cover.

The pen also has some tensioning posts stuck in at the corners so that the wires can be pulled taught.

I have constructed a pair of shelters in the quarantine pen from a pair of apple crates and a pair of cherry crates. The front was knocked off the apple crate and the cherry

crate was nailed on to the top (upside down) to make a nice box. I then screwed on some exterior grade plywood to make them a bit more weather proof and filled the bottom up with hay. The shelter in the background is the Cherry Crate on Apple Crate construction … only Holly thought I was taking a photo of her.

Ah well … she is a pretty goat after all.

Holly’s favorite game at the moment is to climb up onto her shelter and stick her head out between the two joined shade cloth sheets (they are held together with nylon cable ties).

All going to plan, the quarantine pen will be out of service again in about 2 weeks time (here’s hoping!).

The Quarantine Story

Well, the goats have been in quarantine for a month now. And they are beginning to get a little fed up with it. Our older doe, Holly, has managed to maintain an average escape rate of once every three days. So far she has:

· Wriggled under the wire – so I attached heavy steel pipes to the bottom of the mesh;

· Pushed the gate out at the bottom – so I put a concrete block up against the gate;

· Jumped over the top of the enclosure – so I put an extra wire line around the top;

· Made a huge hole in the lighter wire of the gate – so I attached some exterior grade plywood to her gate; and

· Made a mysterious escape – so I scratch my head and say … huh.

The younger doe, Minnie, just patiently waits on her side of the enclosure. Well … I say patiently, but actually there is an awful lot of bleating that goes on.

The main objective with the quarantine is to keep them separated at bed and meal times, so that they don’t share too many fluids. The quarantine pen has worked pretty well for that, although the proof of the pudding will be when I take them back to the vet for a blood test in March. I have very mixed feelings about that deadline.

I would hate to have the blood test come back positive for CAEV. I have already lost two young does and I don’t want to lose any more.

Upgrading the Goats Shelter

The original goat shelter worked OK as it was ... but unfortunately, it quickly became draughty when the fence palings shrank when exposed to the weather. To fix this, I wrapped the shelter with an unused nylon tarpaulin and nailed some more palings around the edges (so that little goats couldn’t easily get to the tarp).

This has now made the shelter very weather proof. The shelter was also moved so that it faced north-east and it is now protected by a very large wattle tree.

Happy goats indeed!

My lovely wife picked up a couple of sections of a discarded picket fence, with the idea that this would protect our lovely little sugar gum sapling that shares the field with the goatlings. I diligently cut the picket fence into three sections and bound it together around the sapling so that little goat teeth couldn’t get to it. O contraire! The little servants of evil knocked the fence over and had a jolly good time reducing the sugar gum to a sugar twig. With the picket fence re-erected and reinforced, we are hoping that there is still enough life left in the root stock and young cambium material left to photosynthesize.

Goat Shelter

The goat shelter that I built is a very simple structure. This was constructed by building a pair of square frames 1.4m x 1.4m from DAR framing timber. The frames were then connected with a further four 1.4m pieces of framing timber. Resulting in the construction of a 1.4 x 1.4 x 1.4 m cube. The roof and floor of the structure were reinforced with an additional piece of framing timber.

A roof was made by nailing fence 1.8m long palings in two overlapping layers. The roof, then, is a fairly waterproof structure that overlaps the shelter by 20 cm all the way around.

Similarly, a single layer of 1.4m fence palings made a floor.

Three walls were enclosed with 1.4m long pieces of fence paling. An area of approximately 15cm was left uncovered underneath the eves of the shelter to provide ventilation.

The shelter was then mounted on about 20cm of cement blocks to keep the timber structure above the ground and (hopefully) reduce the likelihood of rot and extend the life of the shelter.