On some days the World’s Cutest Fainting Goats aren’t as cute as others. When Mina needs to see the farrier she definitely has a “not as cute as others” kind of day. You might recall that Mina broke her right hind leg 3 years ago. We have no idea how it happened. We do know that we rushed her to the vet where she was put under general anesthesia to have her leg set and a custom splint put on her leg. Mina then spent the night in a kennel at the vet clinic. She was fine at her

It has now been two years since Jason’s epic fail (in my opinion of course) at building the goat house. Any visitors to our farm will note that all of the barns and run-in sheds look alike. Everything is white with a red roof. All of the run-in sheds have cupolas on them. Jason did not want the cupolas, he thought they were too expensive. I wanted the cupolas. We have a lot of cupolas. Enough said on that topic. Apparently he decided to make his opinion known by building a go

You will recall that Jason built the goats a new goat sized run-in shed a few months ago. He spent lots of time in the planning and designing phase and built the goats a hurricane proof shed. This is a very important feature in land locked Tennessee where hurricanes are a real problem. We recently realized that Jason made one key mistake in building the shed. No, I’m not talking about the fact that she shed has black shingles instead of red shingles, no cupola and isn’t paine

As you saw in a previous post Jason started construction on new housing for the World’s Cutest Fainting Goats a couple of weeks ago. Jason made sure the engineering was top notch and proudly told me as he was showing me the finished product that it could stand up to a hurricane. I told him that was great. What I didn’t say was that we don’t get hurricanes in Tennessee but I figured why ruin the moment. You may remember this conversation from that previous post as I attempted

The World’s Cutest Fainting Goats have been keeping up busy lately. In all of our spare time (hahahaha) we built them their ghetto fence and moved them to the farm. As I mentioned in the post where we described their moving day, Mina was beside herself when she realized the only shelter they had in their paddock with the ghetto fence was a couple of dogloos. We promised Mina that we would rectify this unfortunate situation as quickly as possible. True to our word we’ve been

With their ghetto fence being completed last week we decided to move the World’s Cutest Fainting Goats today. Given our lack of success with moving Sparky we certainly were not brimming with confidence as we discussed our game plan for goat moving today. I kept reminding Jason that three of the the four goats are fainting goats so if we really had to do it we could make them faint and then put them in the trailer. Of course everyone knows that you do not, under any circumstan

Jason and I have had this need to take on difficult tasks lately. We have been attempting – unsuccessfully to date – to move Sparky the donkey. We’ll have more on the donkey (mis)adventures later. For anyone who missed that bit of fun you can find the donkey moving post here with an update here. We decided to take a breather from failed attempts at relocating Sparky and turned our attention to fence building instead. The World’s Cutest Fainting Goats are also going to need to

I’m not sure if I even want to know what our goats think of these days. To say that we have had some interesting interactions with them would be an understatement. More accurately I should say that Jason has had some interesting interactions with the goats. In the last several weeks we have more rain than I ever remember us having in the months of July and August. Some days we only had a couple of light rain showers. Other days we had rain showers that would best be described

The World’s Cutest Fainting Goats are finally reunited. The temporary fence creating the tiny paddock for Mina and Miss Lyle came down and there was a happy fainting goat reunion. Mina’s broken leg has been deemed almost completely healed by the vet and she no longer has to be confined to her tiny paddock. Jo was overjoyed to be reunited with Mina. Jo butted heads with Mina over and over and over. I think it was the fainting goat version of a happy dance. Miss Lyle bounded a

Mina the fainting goat is on the mend. It has been a month since she somehow broke her right hind leg. She is officially out of her splint, is not wearing the cone of shame, and overall is much happier about her circumstances. Jason and I received the bill a few days ago and we are less happy about the circumstances but what can you do? Jason handing out some raisin treats to Miss Lyle and Mina note Carter playing on the goats’ teeter totter in the background Mina, aka “Min

We seem to have entered this streak for the last several months where, as the saying goes, if we did not have bad luck we would have no luck at all. This past weekend our crisis involved one of the World’s Cutest Fainting Goats. Mina, who strongly prefers to be called Mina the Czarina, broke her right hind leg over the weekend. We have no idea how this happened but we did not need a vet to tell us that her leg was broken. The odd angle at which it was hanging was all that w

Nothing is more fun than spending time each evening with the World’s Cutest Fainting Goats. Jason has been rebuilding the floor on one of the flatbed trailers and it has been parked by the barn during this process. Miss Lyle has loved having this new piece of equipment to explore. Almost every evening we see her jump onto the trailer to check the world out from different perspective. On Saturday evening Cloudy the cat was grooming himself on the trailer and Miss Lyle had

We decided to dress up Jo, one of the World’s Cutest Fainting Goats, as Batman for Halloween. Unfortunately it just didn’t work out all that well. The costume didn’t really fit right, the black cape blended in too much with the black areas on Jo, and all in all it was a Halloween fail. We always joke that Jo wants to be Batman for Halloween so we decided to make her wish a reality. She was pretty tolerant of actually wearing the costume aside from the head band with the b

We had a big day yesterday here at Paradigm Farms ! We’ve been busy from early until very late this week and every day as we drove by Lyle’s home we’d look for her out in her pasture. We got done in good time yesterday and it was a picture perfect sunny fall afternoon, so I suggested that we stop and see about Lyle on our way home. Our intent was to come back with the horse trailer the following day to pick her up but the kind lady who gave Lyle to us insisted that she had a

As most of you know, Melissa and I moved the last group of horses to the new farm a couple of weeks ago, a year less a day from when the first group moved. One of the biggest changes and challenges involved in having everyone at the same place has nothing to do with horses. We now work together every single day instead of just on some days. This means we have had to re-learn how to work (and travel to and from work) together every day. Fortunately, we’ve had plenty of pract

Yesterday evening Jason and I were standing in the aisle of the barn talking about something. It must not have been too important as I can’t remember the conversation we were having. Jo, one of the World’s Cutest Fainting Goats, came sauntering in to the barn. We joke that Mina and Jo like to leave a path of destruction as they go through the barn. They get into everything, knock everything over and generally wreak havoc while having a grand time. We watched Jo walk over to w

I’m sure it comes as no surprise that we tend to keep a lot of horse treats on hand. We’re not usually brand or flavor specific, just whatever we happen to pick up at the feed or tack store. I like to keep Mrs. Pasture’s around just because they don’t tend to crumble in my pockets. Jason and I were in the barn last week and for some reason I gave the Mrs. Pastures cookies that I had in my pocket to Mina and Jo, World’s Cutest Fainting Goats. They went nuts! Judging by the

Since Jason doesn’t have enough Faune, Asterik, Winston and Sebastian Tony was staring hard at something #goats #jason

Today was one of the horse’s favorite days (not) – worming day. We have to do this a few days each year and I finally woke up and realized these days could be hard or easy. I’ve mentioned this on the blog before but a couple of years ago after a morning of chasing down horses and having paste wormer all over my hands I decided their had to be an easier way. Since the majority of the horses live outside 24/7 I don’t have the luxury of just going from stall to stall and worm

I learned today what happens when a fainting goat gets into the poultice. You probably don’t need me to tell you that it makes a big mess. Poultice makes a big mess anyway without a goat (fainting or otherwise) in the mix! Faune came in this morning with a fat left hind leg. He had a small cut about an inch above the coronet that we think is the cause. Usually about once a year or so this will happen where a horse gets a cut or a scrape and for some reason it makes the le