Recently I began going through a box of old photos that we had accumulated. I picked out some of the more interesting images to scan, so I could have digital copies of them. A couple winter photos I found featured the herd of Angora goats that I used to have.
Our Canadian winters are difficult for all living things, including the Angora goats with their thick coat of mohair. The photo above shows one of the goats sporting two enormous balls of ice hanging down from her neck. During the winter I always had to have a couple of rubber buckets of water out in the paddock for the goats to drink during the day. When they drank from the buckets they usually got some of the long hair on their necks wet. As that wet hair slowly froze into ice, and as they walked around in the deep snow, some of the snow accumulated on their wet necks, slowly forming the ever-growing snowballs you see.
Those heavy snowballs on the neck were certainly burdensome for the goat as she maneuvered around during the day. It was always a bit of a struggle for me to rid the poor goat of the giant snowballs. I usually had to just cut off the goat hair that was holding them.
The image below shows the goats out in the paddock during the winter. The snow was too deep for them to eat the grass under it, so I always had to put piles of hay outside for the goats to eat. Because of the deep snow, the goats were fairly restricted to the paths they had made in the snow.
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