Chloe and her pseudo-pregnancy

Well, this will be a strange story, even for you farmers. We have three goats that are four years old, all female, and they have never been bred. Their names are Chloe, Heidi, and Muffin, all appropriately named by our grand-children. So far so good.

Then Chloe starts building up milk in her teats like she was pregnant ... But it was all in her mind ... Except the milk was real. For awhile she was just laying around like she was sick so a round of anti-biotics was prescribed by the vet and after a few days she was better ... But the enlarged teats were still there full of milk. Then after a period, she began to bleed from one of the teats. The vet came and said she needed to go to their animal hospital fir a couple of days to let them work on her there... Mainly to drain her teats and make sure she had no infection left.

The trick was we had to get her to the vet. Chloe weighs about 120 pounds and Susan and I tried for 3 hours to load her in our truck last Wednesday to no avail. We had to lift her about a foot but she was too heavy and no enticements would get her to voluntarily go into the back of the truck. So we gave up. Round one to Chloe.

Then Thursday, our good friend Victor came and with his expertise and strength, Chloe was loaded at 7 am to go to the vet. We unloaded her by using a hay bale as a step for her and an attendant at the vet's basically pulled her out. Whew!

She was at the vet's for two nights and today the vet called and said she was ready to come home. Problem was going to be loading he again ... I was in an all-day class at UNC and unavailable.

So my fearless wife drove the truck over to the vet's, the vet folks loaded her, and Susan was able to unload her at home without much trouble. So now Chloe is back home and was welcomed by the dogs and by Heidi and Muffin.

It looks like she will not have to have her teats surgically removed and we will get the lab result back in 10 days to know if she needs any further anti-booties.

We had never heard of this "pseudo-pregnancy" stuff before but we have just learned of a fox in a zoo nearby having the same thing. So, strange but not too rare I suppose.

Anyway, we hope our special Chloe is on the full road to recovery. Also nice to have a large-animal vet about 20 minutes away.