When you own dairy goats spring is the most exciting and most daunting time of year. You have the excitement of kids being born but deep down you know that you have to do the not so fun tasks, tattooing is one of those.
All livestock should be marked in a way that ID's your farm, our goats get tattoos. We have registered our farm name with the American Dairy Goat Association and been given a tattoo that will trace our goats back to our farm. This is a very important step in the event you want to show your livestock, our girls love showing livestock of all kinds.
Each year is also represented by a single letter. The letter should be followed by a number. We number ours in the order in which they are born. First kid is X1, second is X2 and on down the line. Now you have your farm ID and your year/number sequence sorted out so the real fun begins.
We use green tattoo ink, even after it fades you can see the tattoo by putting a flashlight behind the ears.
We have 5/16" tattoo pliers and letters. I like to have two sets of pliers so that I can do both tattoos without having to stop to change everything out. One set has the farm numbers and the other has the year and kid number on them. Go ahead and test it on paper to make sure you put the letters in properly.
Grab your goat and restrain them. If you do tattoos when they are only a few days old, you can hold the kid while someone else does the tattoos. We typically use our milk stand. There is a cut out that is lower for the kids and one higher for the adults.
Clean the ear out, we use all natural antibacterial wipes. Add ink to the ear. Now it's time to do the actual tattooing. Position the pliers so that the tattoo will be in the middle of the ear. Squeeze pliers and release. Now take some more ink and rub over the ears to fill in the holes left by the pliers.
Repeat the above process on the other ear.
Your farm tattoo will go in their right ear while the year and number kid will go into the left ear.
Now I hardly ever see people talk about tattooing a LaMancha as this is another process due to the size of their ears. Even the grades that have "elf ears" have to be tattooed on the webbing of their tails. I thought I could do this alone with the kid in the milk stand but I couldn't. It was my first time to tattoo a LaMancha so I had to have help. We put her in the milk stand and someone else had to help me hold up her tail so that we could tattoo it. The process is mostly the same. The herd number goes on the right tail web. The year and kid number goes into the left tail web.
I hope this helps you in your tattooing adventure! Thanks for reading and Happy Homesteading!
Until next time...
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