Animals on the Farm

It’s been a while since I posted an update about my internship situation, and in an upcoming blog post I will get into why that is (spoiler alert, the situation was not good).

For now, I still want to post a blog just about the farm animals I took care of on a daily basis when I was still staying at my fiance’s house during their personal covid outbreak.

So first of all, here are the half-grown pigs in their little enclosure. It doesn’t take long for pigs to mow down any vegetation in their area and turn it into a little mud pit for keeping themselves cool in the heat, so you can see that all the grass is completely gone. That blue thing to the right of the photo is their food trough, and in the photo the pigs are crowding up against the fence because they’re hoping it’s feeding time (it wasn’t).

Here’s a bonus pig snout for added cuteness!

These are my nieces pet goats (aka her “stimmy” goats as they were bought with the stimulus check that also went for kids). Their names are CeCe and DeDe, but don’t ask me which one is which in this photo. All I know is that DeDe is the friendly one and CeCe doesn’t tolerate attention, though at the time that I was living there, both were incredibly skittish and I could only go inside to feed them (no petting!!!). You can’t tell from the photo, but these goats are fenced into this area, and that wooden shed behind them is their area to go inside if it rains or gets too hot (that’s also where their food and water is).

Once they get older, the plan is to breed them with male goats and then have milk goats, then use the goat milk for soap making. My fiance has a talent for making shampoo bars, so we’re excited to try soap-making with goats’ milk.

These are three of the four cows that are in this pasture. None of them were feeling too friendly at the time I was taking photos, though they come running up to their fence when it’s feeding time. That wooden enclosure in the second photo is for the cows to take shelter in when it rains, but they have a barn (unpictured) for shelter as well.

At the time that I was staying there, their youngest calf was still small enough that he could be bullied by the older cows, so I would have to stay nearby during feeding times to chase the older cows off and let the baby eat all his food.

These are just a few of their laying chickens. They actually have a good many chickens, so every time I walked outside to take care of the animals they would come running toward me like a zombie movie. At this time they were free-range chickens (as long as they stay in the yard) but they returned to their coop for laying eggs.

And this is the rooster who attacked me every time I walked outside. He didn’t stay on the farm for very long.

I don’t think I took any pictures of the meat chickens while I was there, and for good reason because they are very ugly creatures. I’ve learned since then that they grow so fast their feathers can’t keep up, so they always look partially naked. The meat chickens were enclosed in one area of the yard, and I would have to go in three times a day to make sure they had enough water because it was so hot. It was such a nasty experience because they would flock to my feet and splatter my legs with “mud,” I would barely be able to keep my balance while walking through the chickens and “mud,” and then they would constantly escape their enclosure and I would have to chase them down and carry them back, feeling their weird skin the whole time. As someone who’s a vegetarian, keeping these things for food just didn’t seem worth it to me. That’s why I told my fiance that we have our own home, if he wants meat chickens then they’ll have to be his job alone because I will not deal with those nasty things ever again! I didn’t mind any of the other animals, but meat chickens are just too much.

I also realized, as I was going through my photos, that I forgot to take pictures of the quail. Instead, here’s a picture of Tom the turkey.

Tom has a wife, Tillie, but I couldn’t manage to get her to let me take a photo of her.

Now for the little farm helpers!

This is Willow, my fiance’s parents’ dog. In the photo she’s taking shelter from the heat under the back porch while she waits for me to be done.

This is my fiance’s dog, Rhea, mid-trot, and a better view of the farm. You can see on both the left and right there are garden areas, both of which went a little wild while everyone was sick. Many of their plants didn’t make it through this time, so it’s unfortunate that they lost the free produce. Many of the buildings you can see here are sheds and barns for the animals, with the chicken and pig pens just out of sight. The cow pasture is directly ahead, and that purple wood enclosure is one of the roosting places for the laying chickens.

These are the farm kittens before they were old enough to leave their little nest. At this time, their mama was still alive and well, but she since did not make it due to an illness. While their mama was very friendly and sweet, these kittens did not get nearly enough handling (again, because we were all either sick or busy and couldn’t spend much time with them), so they’re kind of feral at this point and spend most of their time out of sight. Even so, we named them Black Bean and Habanero.

So yeah! That’s the other challenge I had to take care of while my fiance was sick, and some days I still had to work an 8-hour internship shift, so you can imagine I was exhausted most days. There were many days I had to use my half-hour lunch break to water the chickens and try to get my fiance to eat. This was the first rough time I had this summer, between worrying about my fiance’s health and then having so many tasks to do I felt like I couldn’t keep up, but everything turned out okay in the end.