Devastation.

Heres the thing: my farm got massacred by dogs two weeks ago while I was at work. They killed and mauled the goats, killed one of my chickens (the rest must have hid in the coop or something), they even killed our cat Ambrose! I came home to a battlefield scattered with bleeding and dying animals, with the occasional corpse to add flair. It was horrible. It completely devastated me. The worst part was calling every vet in town, only to be told that they only treat cats and dogs. So I'm standing over my 2 month old Sable who's neck is ravaged and she's just lying on her side crying and crying, and I can hear air escaping through a hole in her throat, and they wont come do basic first aid because she's not a dog. I screamed and cried and yelled and sobbed, but nobody would help me. So I called the sheriff and animal control, who showed up and looked around and the animal control officer said, "Wow. This is horrible. Let me go get my camera." I said, "Can't we help the ones that are still alive?!!" So she called in and checked and they told her "we don't treat goats" and that the best thing I could do was get a neighbor to put them down for me. After seeing this was not gonna fly, she gave me the names of some vets in neighboring towns, and to make a long story short, I finally found a vet who'd come from Summerville, an hour away. He showed up at about 8 pm, 5 hours after I got home and discovered what had happened. In the meantime, my mom and Dustin had left work and drove an hour from Charleston to come help, and Dustin's parents came to collect Ayden (who was having a grand time finding new dead animals and poking them with a stick- he's the one who found Ambrose). My goat mentor, Casey, drove 45 minutes to come help and showed up with a cooler full of medicines and supplies. Other goat people I'd met showed up, too, families in tow. They helped carry mauled goats from various corners of the property (even Tierra who weighs about 140 lbs!!) into the barn. After it was all said and done, I had 7 remaining goats with various degrees of damage, ranging from Tiny who was the only one completely unscathed, to Lucy who's eye we thought was gone along with a good part of her face, and Sable with the wheezing hole in her neck. Mumble had a bum leg, Tierra's one ear was completely detached from her head on the underside, multiple puncture wounds on her ears and neck, one front leg, and a few good tears on her side and udder. Louie, who I swear was dead when I first found him but must have merely been unconscious, had his ears in shreds with most of the skin just gone and huge chunks missing. He has so much hair it was hard to find wounds under it all, but that also probably protected him to some degree. Lucy's right eye was swollen shut and about a 2 inch diameter chunk of flesh missing around the eye, another hole on the bridge of her nose so that you could see into her sinus cavity, and another hole the size of a silver dollar on her opposite cheek. A dog had obviously been dragging her around by her face. Gypsy, who was missing for the first couple hours, was eventually found under the bushes by my front door, relatively unscathed but for a 2 inch hole on one of her back legs so that you could see the exposed tendon, and one front elbow a raw bloody mess. When the vet finally arrived, he took a look around and said, "Where do I start?" He'd brought his wife, also a vet, and a vet tech to assist, and together they worked on the goats for almost 3 hours, flushing wounds, giving steroids to fight shock, pushing fluids. We all did what we could to help, even getting down and giving injections for them. Amazingly, all the goats were still alive when I went out the next morning. I had to give antibiotic and pain medicine by injection twice a day for 7 days, which for 6 goats comes to a whole lotta injections! Sable had air under her skin from all the puncture wounds, and her entire torso was crinkly to the touch.

So the casualties were all of my Nigerian Dwarves except for Mumble. That means Harmony, Puck, and my sweet sweet silly Poe are all no longer with us. Sahara was still alive when I got home, but by the time the vet got here we all agreed we could not let her suffer any more and let him put her down. I think in the end their size worked against them. I still don't know how Mumble and Tiny were spared, but Mumble obviously got hurt somehow in the process. Perhaps they were hiding in the barn. Who knows?

One of the worst parts about this for me is thinking how the dogs were here until they simply got tired. Nobody stopped them or chased them off. They were here wreaking havoc and killing until they got bored. It makes me want to scream.

I realize now that I simply cannot keep them safe, so I have to get rid of them. The dogs jumped 3 separate fences to get to them, two chain link, and one electric netting. Since it happened I've had to resort to keeping them locked in the barn with the door closed, which goes against everything I believe in. Animals should be free to live as God intended. But, until a couple days ago they would not venture out even if I was sitting outside the barn door to babysit. Most of them did not even get up on their feet for 3 days, and Sable stood on her own after 6. She's my miracle baby. Her neck swelled to 3 times its normal size, but the whole time she ate and drank like a champ. That first day after the attack I tried to give her some milk in a bottle but stopped when I saw it dripping out the hole in her neck. :( Now she's up and venturing outside, although her neck is still curved and very swollen. I've even begun to think that it could possibly be broken. I've already found a new owner for Gypsy, who's coming to get her next weekend. She's going to breed mini-Nubians with her (she raises Nigerian Dwarves- the woman I bought all of mine from). I have a lead on new homes for Tiny and Louie and Lucy, also. My brother will be moving here in July and would like to take Tierra, Sable, and Mumble. So I just have to try to keep them alive and safe until then.

I've had many suggestions from people for ways to trap and kill my neighbors dogs (who I'm sure did this), ranging from hanging fish heads on industrial size treble hooks from a tree, pans of antifreeze, and simply shooting them. I am proud to say that thanks to my other brother, Mike, I now have a shotgun and riffle, and am just itching to use them.

So now we just don't know what our vision for the farm is, and I'm so hurt and disillusioned that I don't even know if this is a direction I want to go in anymore. Ironically, Dustin is the one who says no matter what happens, he wants to own at least 50 chickens and maybe even a couple goats if he could ever talk me into it again. The irony kills me.

But to experience first hand the fact that an entire dream/business venture can be wiped out in 5 hours while you're at work, from something you never could have prevented... it's just too much for me. We were supposed to pick up a livestock guardian dog puppy this month, but honestly, even with one guardian dog against a pack of what was very probably pit bulls (every manly wanna-be in Walterboro owns a pit bull), I most likely would have come home to a dead dog in addition to goats.

So now I'm a-dog-huntin.