Last Thursday, we were SO excited to bring home an amazing little buckling, Mosaic’s Smooth Criminal. We don’t care all that much about superficial flashy stuff – we focus more on udders & conformation, but this guy has it all – multiple MDGA Top 10s and show wins in his recent pedigree PLUS that flashy stuff – he is covered in moonspots, is polled, and has clear blue eyes!
Well, he HAD clear blue eyes.
Right as we brought Smoothie to our little quarantine pen to settle in, our neighbors started setting off fireworks, and he went nuts – literally bouncing off the walls in fear. We tried to comfort him, but he was too freaked out, so we locked him up and left him to rest until Friday morning, which was apparently not a great idea.
When we went to check on everyone in the morning, he had made it out of the 4ft high pen and into our buck gen pop. Everyone was laying together peacefully, but poor Smoothie had a big goose-egg welt above his eye, where either he or one of the other boys must have bashed it. Other than the lump on his forehead, he seemed okay, so we thought that was the end of the trouble.
We thought wrong. Over the course of the holiday weekend, Smoothie’s eye started looking weepy on the 1st through 2nd, then seemed more goopy on the 3rd, then started clouding over on the 4th. The vet was closed for Independence Day, but we brought Smoothie in as soon as they opened back up again on the 5th.
Turns out our little guy scratched his cornea pretty badly and will need eye ointment 3x and 3 big meloxicam tabs 2x daily. The vet doesn’t think the scratch is deep enough for the eyeball’s structure itself to be compromised, but there’s a pretty strong chance that he’ll always have a scar right in the middle of his formerly-clear blue eye.
We pulled him and his new forced-buddy Hot Shot, who keeps finding creative places in the pasture to get himself stuck, into the quarantine shed in our doe pasture, since (clearly) our bucks’ solitary pen isn’t escape-proof.
Seriously, it is always something with these guys lately!
*** Update: July 25 – A few weeks later, Smoothie’s eye is now good as new! We’ve moved him and Hot Shot into their own pen in the corner of our goat bachelor pasture. The big guys are starting to head into rut, so we’ve gotta keep these littles separate for their own safety. We might add Heartbreaker to their pen, too – he’s bigger and has horns to protect him, but he’s already been knocked over a couple times by Maui and Moose.
