[nw_arizona_granny]

LOL, you are right, it took me a while to learn to not run when a goat lowered his head and came running, then I learned that if you just stand there, he will rub his scent on you.

Except for one mean old billy, that I had to take to get the ladies of the herd, and he did not like me and had the full intent to stomp me, no games with him.

One family that I knew, would buy goats, kill them and then cut gashes in the legs and fill them with the water hose, so the skin did not touch the meat.

They do have glands on the side, some where I read they have 7 scent glands.

If you have goats, watch the does, they will rub their heads and sides on you.

Gall, yes that is the gland I was thinking of and could not recall the name of, it is one of those things that I learned as a child, for we did not have refrigeration, so killed and cooked it the same day.

Yes, today they do chill them as soon as possible.

Thank you for sharing your knowledge, for it is the little details that mean so much, if we are all suddenly killing our own foods again.

Mary taught me to pull the chickens neck hard and then they do not flop around, while you chop off the head.

[hiredhand]

Oh my! Goats are something else! The other woman in my life is a beautiful 16 yr old (my DAUGHTER!) and she's the primary goat herder at our little farm. She truly possesses a depth of knowledge and I only know what little I pick up from her. I think he's got 15 does right now....six of them are wet.... plus half a dozen or so sheep. She bought a big Lamancha buck a couple of years ago when she was 14. She's always been petite and even now she "might" weigh in at 120lbs, but I doubt that! The buck weighed in between 250lbs and 275lbs! She went into the pen one day to move watering buckets and he followed her, which isn't unusual. Goat bucks make a rather strange noise when they're "interested" in females and it sort of sounds like "bluh-bluh-bluh", and they sort of lick the air with their tongues when they do this. This by itself isn't a bad thing, but usually right after this, the object of their misdirected affection finds himself/herself UNDER the animal. In this case, he was over twice her size. I was watching this entire event from the back porch about 50 yards away and while I couldn't hear the buck, I could tell by his movements that he had just made this noise to her.

My daughter turned... dropped the buckets...stooped down beside him...grabbed him by his big stinky beard with his head over her right shoulder with her left hand, and then she grabbed his right front leg just above the hoof, and she pulled his front end out from under him! He went down hard and she hopped right onto his head and sat there! He was making LOTS of noise and trying to get up thrashing around! But he couldn't with her sitting on his head! She leaned over and got right in his face and screamed into his ear that if he made that noise around her again she would cut his throat and let her brothers just put him in the freezer! She didn't know I was watching. When she got up, I asked her if everything was O.K. and she said, "YES". Bucky Boy was very polite to her after that! :-) She stopped to talk with me on the back porch on the way back to the house and she smelled TERRIBLE. She went straight to the shower!

I saw some people skin a beef once like you describe, except they used an air compressor and a metal tube. They didn't even cut a gash. The tube was tapered and sharp on the end and they slipped it under the skin on the inside of one of the hind quarters and pretty much just inflated the hide right off! It only took a few minutes to skin after that!

I meant to mention that my friend (with the degree in poultry science) showed us another way to kill chickens. You hold the bird in a way that basically permits you to distend the vertebra in their neck and it severs the spinal cord. They do NOT move much after that! We can't quite get the hang of it though and I need to get him to show me again HOW he did it.

Chicken killed and cooked immediately afterwards is the BEST! :-)