Time to trim hooves!

Hi, it's Celia again!

One of the jobs I have as a goat owner is trim hooves. If you don't trim a goat's hooves, the goat can go lame. How often you have to do it depends on the goat and how fast its hooves grow, and whether or not the goat walks on rocks. Rocks would naturally wear away the hooves. You would think since we live on top of Stone Hill we would have a lot of rocks. We don't. We have stones, which are little pieces of rock. And stones don't do the job. We should have bought a house on Rock Hill, which is the next hill over. But we didn't. And because we didn't, we have to trim hooves. You can see in this picture how long the hooves have gotten. They shouldn't be long and pointy like they are in the picture.

Mom helped me trim hooves on Mother's Day. She's a good mom, isn't she? She said she didn't mind because she was happy to get it off the "to do" list. Farmers have a long "to do" list. Mom learned how to trim hooves by watching youtube. She learns a lot that way.

We put Mali in the milking stand and gave her some grain. She is very happy if she's eating. The hooves are soft, like finger nails, so it didn't take mom very long to trim them. She started with the front hooves. They're easier because Mali doesn't mind those so much. But since Mali puts most of her weight on her back legs, she really doesn't like having those hooves trimmed because she has to shift her weight to the front. In the picture below the left toe is almost done. The right toe still needs to be done.

In the picture below Mom is digging out the dirt so she can see better. 

All done! Mali is much happier with trimmed hooves.