Maggie

This is Maggie, officially titled; Lucky Star's BT Xtreme. She was an 07 kid, which was an X year for the American Dairy Goat Association. Goat owners can name their goats
whatever they'd like, but often they will start the goat name with whatever letter year it is. Obviously this is a method of keeping track of how old your goats are. I'm guessing it is especially helpful for the farms that have forty or fifty kids born a year. All six of our original goats were born in 07, and both farms we purchased them from insisted not only that their names begin with X, but then there were different family line rules. For example, Maggie's Dam and Grand-dam were named after magazines. We had one doe that had to have a name out of literature and one with a nature (tree, flower, landscape) name. Needless to say we got a little tired of X names so this is Maggie. Last winter we would take all of the does outside for walks up and down our quarter mile driveway. I would pull Noah on his sled and the does would follow us. At some point Maggie started pushing Noah over and running in to him. Then she started picking on him when we were in the goat pen. At the time Noah was less than two years old, and he would just be doing his thing and Maggie would go out of her way to charge at him and knock him over. So we started taking fewer walks and Maggie starting remaining behind. When we go into the pen now she gets tied up before Noah comes in. Last spring when Noah was first learning to talk he just called Maggie, Mean. We would prompt him to tell company the names of all the goats and he would point them all out, saying, Rose, Xanadu, Xoe and Mean. As time progressed she became Mean Maggie, and now thankfully she is back to Maggie. As we start spending more time with the goats as the weather gets nicer, we are going to start working with her on these behavior issues. A fellow goat owner has given me a couple suggestions and I am looking forward to trying them out.

As you may have guessed Maggie is our strongest Doe. She is our tallest, longest, smartest most dominant doe. She has the best udder and was our best milker. And she knows it. I don't think Maggie is so much mean as much as she is an opportunist. The goats all have their rank in the herd. Maggie just thinks that her position in life is upwardly mobile, and is not limited by the fact that she is a goat. Here is a picture of Maggie and Noah, when they got along better.