Milking The Goats

Have you ever had to milk the goats?

That was one of my daily chores growing up. From the age of 8 or so I had to milk the goats once in the morning, and once in the evening. Iris, Blackie, and lots of other goats whose names escape me right now, all had to be milked twice a day, so that their teets wouldn't grow sore and so that we could collect fresh milk for homemade cheese and such. (My parents didn't allow us to buy store bought milk you see).

There were many challenges I had to overcome during my years of goat milking. At the beginning, the hardest part was being much smaller than the Nubian dairy goats I was to manage. I was a lilly white blond boy and these were sleek beasts that never liked being told what to do. Just to get them into the milking stall, I would have to lure each goat toward me with hay or grain. Then, I would have to push, pull and prod them until they would leap up onto what we called the milking platform. I would coax their head between two wooden slats by tempting them with more grain, and then quickly fasten a latch to hold them in place.

The fun part was the actual goat milking. My forearms and hands eventually grew strong and I developed milking routines to efficiently squeeze out a few gallons of milk each day. Pull, sqeeze, pull, sqeeze, pull, squeeze...and on and on and on. Back and forth, from teet to teet, until the old plastic milk buckets we used to use filled up. My parents had hooked up speakers and an old radio in the Goat Milk House so we could listen to public radio while doinng chores. I used to change the station when I was a little older so I could rock out to Men At Work, Tina Turner, and Tears for Fears -- and whatever else the local rock station used to play back in the day. Another fun game I used to play was to try and tag the cats with long sprays of goat milk. They loved it. They would gather excitedly around at my feet and open their mouth wide so I could spray warm milk right down their throat straight from the source itself.

The worst part about milking the goats was straining the milk and preparing it to be refridgerated. We used these special white filters my parents would buy at the local farm store and strain the milk into glass jars my mother used to save. This is where I would notice all of the little hairs and crud that would have dropped into the milk during the process of milking. While the strainer did a great job of separating the milk from the junk, somehow that direct understanding that goat shit had been in my milk never quite settled with me.

Even though the chore wasn't so bad, to this day I don't drink goat's milk or eat goat's cheese...