Word on the street is that intact male goats smell something awful. Every article about goats on the web I see mentions this. It really seems to be a point of great interest.
So, country dopers, how bad is it? Are we talking skunk bad? How lasting? What kind of odor? And why do they smell so much?
Buck goat is not as bad as skunk, but it is pretty bad during the mating season. (The rest of the year it is mildly musky, but tolerable.) You don’t want a buck goat rubbing up against you–it can take a couple of washings to get the odor out out some clothing. The only way that it is truly nauseating is if you find yourself confined in an airless room with one. (Say, if you need to do some “doctoring” in the late Autumn and you take the goat into a closed stall.)
It won’t kill you. It won’t even make you wish you were dead. It is just an intense, musky odor that is a bit unpleasant and kills one’s appetite.
Here’s a general care article, and yes they do stink.
What might be of greater concern is if the goat is going to be of any size, intact billy goats can be very aggressive and potentially quite dangerous.
They stink because it makes the lady goats go wild. For the same reason they urinate on their front legs. What can I say?
Many male goats are disbudded as small kids (it involves searing the incipient horn bud so that it doesn’t grow into a horn) and if they are to remain bucks people also sear the scent gland next to the horn bud, so they don’t stink quite so much.
It isn’t horrible like close-up skunk but it does kind of dominate your consciousness.
Never turn your back on a buck goat, a ram, or a bull. Ever.
a couple stinky carboxylic acids are found in goats and named after them. they are oily so they stick around on whatever they come in contact with.
Notes to self:
I used to raise miniature goats. The billy goats would urinate on their beards, not just their front legs. They smelled pretty ripe.
What are the fly levels like with this wonderful stench?
I had a goat that had no nose.
So he didn’t smell at all?
He smelled terrible!
Ba-da-bump! You’re welcome!
– Straight Men R Us
Surprisingly, not that bad. Horses seem to attract a lot more files.
We stopped keeping goats several summers ago.
Doctoring (as I used it very loosely), would typically be anything from treating small cuts or abrasions they have picked up while rubbing on the sides of stalls to trimming hooves. (The latter is probably not really “doctoring,” but it needs to be done.) Disbudding and castrating occurs when the kids are quite young with little to no odor, so those tasks do not have an odor problem. Of course, being called out by Debbie to help with my first round of castrating the morning after we had seen Pelle the Conqueror was not a happy experience.)
By the time summer rolls around and they need to have their coats shaved down in anticipation of the summer heat, they tend to be months past breeding season and are only moderately stinky.
The amount of flies present is a function of how frequently one mucks out the stalls. With fairly regular mucking every few weeks, flies are not all that noticeable. Flies are not attracted to the musk that excites the does. (If one can afford to buy enough straw, one can muck every week, but we were never quite that rich.) Goat turds are small pellets, similar to deer turds, not the big sloppy “pies” and “road apples” of cattle and horses, so mucking does not need to be a daily event. If the straw gets deep enough to absorb and hold urine, it is past time to clean the stalls. And, to the extent that the goats can have a grassy pasture much of the time, the stalls do not fill up as quickly.
Received 2 male goats today and they are rutting they smell the females that we keep separate. We attempted to feed them and were spat apon and other nasty bodily fluids were spewed. Let’s just say I’d rather eat the males before they start this adventure into adult male goathood
Castrate them and the problem is over forever.