I love our goat babies, they are so cute! But I especially fell in love with “sunflower”, who didn´t really have a good start into life. She had a very bad orf infection that made drinking painful and nearly impossible. Orf is a virus disease that primarily occurs in sheep and goats. It is very contagious and also known as “scabby mouth” disease, which makes sense to everybody that has ever seen the result of this infection. I would compare it to a very bad herpes and sunflower was hit by it very hard. Her mouth looked terrible and was bloddy and earned her the nickname “Orfi”. But after some weeks of special care and away from her friends, everything healed very nicely and we could literally see how she improved. The formerly weak goat became energetic and started jumping around and often enough she escaped her pen.
Fighting an orf infection seems hard enough to me, but just days before we wanted to release her back into her herd, this little bundle of energy was too excited to get her milk that she jumped around and hurt her leg. I have been out for only ten minutes, to feed the other ones, but when I came back to give sunflower her bottle, she was limping on her back front leg and she held it as if it was broken. I felt so sorry for her but luckily (we found out the next day) nothing was broken.
Not even a week later, her front leg got a bit better, I gave her a beauty treatment. Her fur was very sticky and dull so she got a nice and warm bath. But can you believe it – when I took her out to dry, she was not putting any weight on her back leg, meaning she was limping on two legs now. How is that even possible??
The poor thing is not really improving with her hind leg and she still limps but at least she is back outside with her friends. I am always looking forward to see her and to comfort her a bit and she obviously is enjoying some cuddling as well 🙂
Good night from Namibia,
Sininho
Sininho´s World 
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