Leading A Goat Without A Collar

Leading a goat without a collar is easier than you think.  I will show you with Thorn. This is one of my old men Thorns who is 10. Now you can see he's pretty thin during the winter.  We're feeding him an intentional diet, acknowledging the fact that his teeth are all worn down.  By the way you do need to take care of your goats teeth.  They can be floated and their lives can be extended by floating their teeth like they do a horse. It's not common practice, but we should be doing it.  One of the things I was going to show you real quick is how to lead a goat without a collar. When you need them to go with you, I'm going to show you how I kind of train my goats to do it in just a nice way.  And I'm not, you know hamstringing them and it’s just an easy way to lead them.

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Leading A Goat Without A Collar With Thorn

But I'm going to show you with Thorn how to lead a goat easily. For some reason, goats respond to this, and it's where I just I just put my hand kind of under their chin. And when you do that, you got this finger kind of hooked right here.  And I'm not really grabbing on. I'm just coercing along slowly. So, I'll just come up and I'll grab the side of their face and I'll say come on, Thorn.

Leading A Goat Without A Collar - Turning & Leading

And then they're really leadable like this. And so, I’ll stand  him here before the gate. He kind of knows the system. And then if he doesn't want to go in, then if you really want to move a goat, you move him with their tail.  So those are two ways that can really be helpful in in navigating a goat around the pasture is by doing this gentle thing on the side. So when you're in a jam and you're trying to move a goat around your pasture, this works well.  Or lead a doe in somewhere else and you don't have a collar and a lead. Goats don't like to be grabbed by a collar. So I always try to use the lead combined with the collar, but if I don't have that quick, I just lead with my hand.  I found that really to be super helpful where you just kind of put the finger on the  underside and you walk along with them and they come with you. So I hope you find that helpful.

Mark Warnke