By Chris Smith | 21 November 2016 14:18:23When you think of goats, the first thing that comes to mind is their size.
That’s the biggie, right?
The goat is one of the largest land animals on earth, and it has to get a fair bit of space to survive.
But there’s another biggie.
A goat’s gestation time is shorter than a human’s, and that means that when a goat dies it’s not just that you have to look after the animal for a couple of days.
It also means you’re going to have to find out exactly how old it is.
And goat owners are not always happy to hear this.
They might worry that the goat is going to go to waste, or that it’s a burden on the community and they need to do something about it.
The truth is that goats are not going to be a burden for people.
That would be a terrible mistake, says Chris Smith, founder of GoatWatch, a website which documents the lives of some of the world’s largest land mammals.
“There’s just not enough room for it in terms of space and it’s very, very slow, so goats don’t go out and hunt,” he explains.
“They’re very, really active animals, and when they’re doing hunting they’re getting very big and they’re very slow.”
“A goat’s lifespan is about one year.
They can go through two births before they are about 12 months old.”
The gestation period is about six weeks long, and if you look at the data, the average age of a goat is about two and a half years old.
This is a very short gestation period for an animal that is not very big, and therefore a lot of goats don´t live to be about 12 to 14 months old.
It’s also not that goats donít have the patience to live long.
There are a few examples of goats that are very active during the breeding season.
“It would be very difficult to manage an animal at that age if they were running around all day long,” says Smith.
“So the idea of doing something like this is a bit of a waste of time, but if you think about it, there are other animals that have similar needs that we would have a lot less to worry about if we managed to do this with goats.”
The average life expectancy of a healthy goat is around nine years, but there are some that live longer than that.
The average lifespan of a normal goat is two to three years, and there are others that live more than two years.
But when it comes to goats, you would expect that if they lived longer, they would die sooner.
That´s because there are different types of life.
For instance, some of them have very long lifespans, but others are much shorter.
A normal goat has a lifespan of three to five years, while a female goat has around six to seven years.
That is a difference of up to 20 years in a single goat, according to the GoatWatch website.
The most common cause of death for a goat would be of an infection.
Infections are a huge problem in goat farming, says Smith, but goats don`t get infected very often.
“Grazing is an incredibly tough job, and goats are highly resilient animals.
They get better over time,” he says.
“The goats are protected from the weather, from diseases, and they can recover very quickly from an infection and a wound.”
And that’s why they doníT die from an illness very often, according the Goatwatch website.
If a goat suffers an infection, the vet can check that the animal is in good health.
It can be painful, and the vets will give antibiotics to help.
But the only way to prevent the infection from spreading, is to keep the animal alive and well.
The last thing a goat needs is to die of an illness, says Mark Gorton, goat and dairy farmer from Gortons Farm in Tyneside.
“An infected animal can become infected again, and a second infection could spread and kill the animal,” he adds.
“If it happens to an infected animal, they will die.”
Gortan says that in the early stages of an outbreak, he would consider letting the goat out of the pen and into a field to help prevent the spread of the infection.
But that would be impractical, because the goats would need to be removed and put in quarantine before they could be rehomed.
“We have to think about all the implications for the community,” he agrees.
“This is a problem for the farmer, it’s for the animal and it is a concern for the goat.
But we need to take the right action.
We need to keep these animals in quarantine and do the best we can to get them out of there alive and to a better environment.”
There are also the complications of the goats that live in the field.