Butchering Dairy Goats for Meat

 We are entering our fifth year raising dairy goats. Initially we did not intend to ever eat our goats. Our plan was to raise does for milk (make cheese), keep two bucks for breeding and sell all the wethered males as pets, pack or companion animals.  At first we wanted to find good homes for the boys and didn't want to sell them for meat except as a last resort. From where I stand now, the flaw in this plan is that there is a low demand for wethered (neutered) male goats, and lack of people who will actually take good care of a non-producing goat. Our experiences have been that people don't take good care of male goats. Potential buyers come out to visit the herd, they talk about their barn, how they'll buy good hay and feed them grain, etc. On one occasion I got a call mid winter that one of the wethers died overnight. They had no idea why. After further investigation, it looks like they didn't have warm enough shelter, and were underfed, so a combination of death by starvation/freezing. After a couple of negative selling experiences we decided that it would be better to sell the wethers to someone who is going to butcher them responsibly as opposed to selling them to owners who are not going to care for them properly.

In the last five years we have gone from eating a mostly vegetarian diet to eating lots of locally and self raised meat, chickens, ducks, turkey and then game given to us, moose and caribou making up our red meat. So, it only made sense that we take the next logical approach and try our own goat meat. This summer we butchered our first goat for meat. She was a three year old doe who had never had a noticeable heat cycle. She was our first goat that we did not breed the first year and we fed her grain when she was younger. I suspect that she got too fat, and it affected her ability to go into heat. 

I'm not going to give a step by step of how to kill and butcher a goat. And you don't have to keep reading if you don't want to go here. However I will go over the basics. My brother does my dirty work. We separate the goat from the herd, offer them tasties, weeds or grain, then he shoots them in the back of the head with a twenty-two pistol, and slits their throat. The next step is hanging them up, skinning and gutting them, which I help with. Our first doe went from alive to wrapped and packaged into the freezer in about four hours. This fall, we let the wether carcases sit in a cool area overnight before cutting them up. In the future, I think that we will butcher goats according to the outdoor temperature, so that we can age the meat for two to three days or more before cutting and packaging.

Our plan from now on is to keep a handful of wethers. Leave them on their dams for the first ten weeks. Separate them into their own pen and feed them hay and garden trimmings until late October/early November. This next year we are not going to neuter them, as they should grow faster and bigger. We'll just have to experiment and see if the young bucks are more flavorful than the the neutered males. 

I should have written this post while the details of cutting up meat was still fresh in my mind. My brother played around with different ways of cutting the ribs. Usually a bone saw is used to cut the ribs and get goat chops (lamb chops) My brother used a hand saw with a blade for cutting wood. This worked pretty well.

 When it was all said and done we had 65 pounds of bone in meat from two seven month old wethers. I am guessing we got close to the same amount of meat off the three year old doe - maybe fifty pounds of bone in meat. As far as taste goes, we have been surprised and honestly, thrilled at how tasty the meat is (never having eaten goat before).

Some key details to keep in mind when thinking about butchering and eating goat meat, is that the goats are small compared to cows and moose etc. So most of the cuts have bones in them, lots of bone surrounded by a little meat. Most of the cuts are better slow cooked in stews, braised roasts, curries or ground up. All of our slow cooked goat meals start the same way, well salted and peppered goat roast seared in oil, on medium high heat all around. Then add garlic, onions and liquid, chicken stock, beer or wine. My favorite flavorings are a little molasses, fresh rosemary and thyme, dijon, whiskey and chicken broth. Other favorites are BBQ pulled goat meat, and red wine and fresh thyme braise with vegetables. When I'm not in the mood to deal with bones at the dinner table, I follow the same steps, but pull the meat out and after it cools, cut all the meat off the bone and return chunks of meat to the pan and reheat before serving. We have done a couple dry leg roasts in the oven that have turned out good. The key to keeping it tender seems to be to cook it to medium rare. I might even try a salt brine the next time we do a dry roast, to increase juiciness and flavor.

We have eaten some cuts; ribs, tenderloin, backstrap, goat chops, cooked fast and hot on the grill or pan seared and finished in the oven. These cuts, seasoned well and cooked fast, are our favorites and come closest to being steak like in texture and flavor - only we are usually gnawing around a bone at the end.

A note on goatiness/ game taste. The meat usually doesn't taste very goaty to us. The exception to this is when I reheat leftovers and there is an excess of fat. To remedy this, I cut most the excess fat off before cooking, and then after a braised dish cools down, I skim the fat off before reheating. Some of the fat on the better cuts tastes milder and is good enough that I often find myself tasting bits of fat to check if they are goaty or not before discarding. Some of our friends and family appreciate the goaty/ gamey taste. My brother has hunted Dall sheep over the last few years. When I taste the fat on the Dall sheep, it tastes very buck like to me. I don't care for it. I did render down a batch of lard from our first doe who had armloads of fat inside. I have yet to use it. I am planing on making soap with it and trying it in pie crust for meat pies.

Final thoughts. Local goat meat is selling for around five to six dollars a pound at Home Grown Market. When local goat owners sell live goats for meat, I believe the hoof on price is $1.75 a pound. Given that we are working towards a self sufficient lifestyle and that we are meat eaters, it only makes sense that we eat our culled animals. The most difficult part about eating goat, is actually killing the animals. They are intelligent and friendly animals. They can easily become pets and close friends. They are also expensive to feed and house. They are time consuming to care for. The more pets, animals, livestock, goats you have, the less attention each animal gets. As a herd owner, I think that butchering and eating your extra wethers is doable, worthwhile, practical, and while not the easiest decisions to make, it sure is nice to have a stockpile of your own red meat in the freezer.

What to do with the Boys? Wethered Male Goats

Mamas lounging with their kids. In this picture the kids are spread out a bit, whereas often the kids will be in piles with their sister or brothers all pressed up against mom.

The sad reality is that we don't need or want the boys as much as the girls. Does give us milk. They do need to be bred every year, or three, to keep in milk, but one buck goes a long way. It is rather ridiculous of us to be keeping three bucks with such a small herd. We most likely wouldn't keep any bucks if there were healthy and local Lamancha bucks available for buck service. 

Our goal in keeping goats is to provide all the milk and cheese that we can use. We also have the numbers that if dairy legislation became more lax we could easily have surplus milk in the next year or two. We do love not needing to rely on outside goats to breed to every year. When the time comes to walk my does up the hill for a date, I rejoice that I am not packing her into the truck and driving an hour or more to breed her to a stranger buck that regardless of what someone says, I couldn't ever know how healthy their buck is like I know the health of my own goats.

We have no need for extra males. We have brush clearers aplenty, we just need more fencing. We don't need any more pets or companion wethers. When we first got into goats I thought we would always try and sell our bucklings as pets as opposed to being raised for meat. I have changed my mind on this matter. I believe that it is better to live a short quality life with a dignified death, than live a long life of neglect. There are folks who are interested in full sized dairy goat males as pets who will take good care of them, and I am more than happy to sell to them. However, good owners can be hard to find. Rather than sell wethers to people I'm not confident about, I will sell them to responsible individuals who intend to provide them with pasture or browse for the summer, followed by a quick and respectful death come fall, winter or the following spring. 

You may be wondering why we don't just raise them and eat them ourselves. The main reason is that we don't want to. Neither D or I, want to take on killing and slaughtering one of our own goat kids. Nor do we want to load them up, drop them off at a slaughterhouse and pay forty-five cents a pound for someone else to process the meat for us. We don't have enough land fenced in. We don't have enough land period. We would have to feed hay as a majority of their diet, which adds to the end cost of the meat. 

Having said this, I feel that it is not practical or sensible to care for these goat kids, disbud them, wether them, feed them, and then at eight weeks of age give them away because we don't want to be feeding them anymore, (and they can technically breed at ten- twelve weeks or so, so they'd have to have their own stall and pen). I have never tasted goat meat, but I would like to. I know that around the world it is more common that beef. I think that learning how to properly butcher a goat would be a worthwhile thing to know. Afterall, at some point we may lose goats that would be just fine for eating, and we could bury them in a deep hole, take them to the dump (seriously people do this and it is legal), or we could butcher the animal and have our own fresh goat meat. What is more respectful? To let an animal rot in the ground, or to use all of it and not let it go to waste? I know I am on touchy ground here, but I have given this topic much thought lately. When we help butcher pigs this fall, I have a feeling that a lot of parts could easily go to waste. I am hoping to not be overwhelmed at the time, to have a plan for each part of the animal and see it through, including the head, hooves, and yes tail and ears too. 

Raising animals for meat is not easy. Giving them happy and healthy lives is our first obligation. Second is killing them as quickly as possible, without making a stressful situation for the animal. Last would be using all of the animal, not letting meat and other edible parts waste, and then I suppose saying a little thanks and acknowledging the animal when you are preparing and eating it. 

At this time we are not meeting our own standards for raising our animals as healthy as we'd like, and the main reason is space. Since first getting into goats, I've realized that they would be much healthier if they had several acres to browse year round. With the chickens we would like to have them on pasture and move them daily so they are not sitting in their own filth. The layers aren't as bad. We clean out their coop fairly regularly and they do get chances to get out depending on the time of year. I notice it the most with the Cornish, especially if it is muddy out that they just eat and poop a lot more and spend more time laying around. We have a couple small poultry tractors built. We are hoping to build two more this summer that move around easier on our hillsides and rough terrain.

Getting back to what to do with male goats. Here is my ideal scenario. I would like to work out an arrangement where I give/sell the wethered males to someone who has at least some experience raising and butchering animals for meat. This person would take at least two goats (so they'd have each-other for company). The goats would be on fenced pasture or woods with some sort of shelter that they could get out of the rain and wind. They could be killed going into winter or housed in more durable warmer housing for the winter and killed in the spring or following fall. As far as keeping costs down, it would make the most sense for someone to butcher the goats themselves as opposed to taking them to a slaughterhouse. If they had to feed the goats hay, over the course of the winter, the cost would also go up. However, the goats will probably be in the eighty pound range come fall, whereas they'll be twice that size a year later. Ideally I'd be interested in working out a deal where I get some meat in return for waiving the initial purchase cost of the animals. I will be talking to interested folks in depth, possibly even visiting the farms where the animals are going. I need to make sure that they will be well taken care of, and if they are truly on pasture or browse, well that is about as happy as a goat can be.