Livestock in the house, OH MY!!

I didn't get a picture, but I had chickens in the bathroom during this last cold blast. Anyone else have livestock in the house? Show and tell, y'all!!

Bottle feeding a lamb. She's outside during day,  inside at night.

Not recently and I don't have pictures...back in the days before technology interrupted our lives we milked our goats in the cabin.  It had a dirt floor and dutch doors  and we just brought in four or five, one at a time twice a day.  Eventually, about the time our first born was crawling we put in a wooden floor and built a 'sort of' barn for the goats...27 at that point.  Usually a cat was there for a squirt or two and someone had their coffee cup ready also.

We had a rejected lamb indoors one spring to bottle feed...built a fence in the corner and brought in some hay for bedding...that was Petunia, sweet thing.

Chickens in the bathroom sounds like a wise move  

I brought a rooster with frozen feet into my bathroom just a few nights ago.  We had temps -35.  All the other chickens did well but his feet froze badly.  I brought him in for 12 hours or so until the temps were a bit better and he had a chance to thaw out.  I kept him in a dog airline
crate.  I'm afraid the damage was already done, but he can get around better now and get up on the perch at night.

One year I had three chicks born very late in the year and it was too cold for them outside even in my brooder, so I raised them in my bathtub with a layer of hay in the bottom.  They lived in there for a month or so.

I got three ducks in the house now, and always have sick lambs in the house during lambing season.

Greg and Malcolm, settin' up shop in the sunroom! ;-)

I don’t have photos, but over the years I have had lambs, kids, chicks, and ducklings in the house at one time or another.

During this most recent polar vortex I put a heating lamp in the chicken house, but no chickens came into the house - they seemed comfortable enough with the lamp.

An old school friend of my Mum’s was a farmer in a somewhat remote country town called ‘Warren’ – about 500km inland from Sydney. It’s predominantly wool and cotton country. Damn hot in summer, can get severe frosts in winter – rain that freezes and brings down power lines, freezes on the fleece of sheep, etc.

During typical changeable Spring weather, the rain/freeze thing is common, it also corresponds with lambing.

So, she had a weather proof room built onto the side of the house directly opposite their wood fired stove – it was enough to comfortably heat this room. She’d then wander around the paddocks and collect all the lambs and put them in this room when the weather looked dodgy – warm and happy babies, no mess inside the house.

Travis Johnson wrote:I got three ducks in the house now, and always have sick lambs in the house during lambing season.

Ducks!
I thought they were super hardy?
Also,  don't they poop like, well, ducks?

William Bronson wrote:
Also,  don't they poop like, well, ducks?

That is why my chickens ended up in the bathroom, easiest floor to clean in the house. I put down towels, but they scruffed them all around, hoping there were snacks under them.
And today's weather is such that they'll be coming in again in a few hours. I'm about to go batten down the bathroom again, they get bored and creative.

Not exactly in the house...



source

Wow, extra points for the wrench that managed to catch the no doubt bewildered chicken..

Fostering Goat kids in the house right now.

one of my little girls last year, mother couldnt take care so the wife and i did.

Hey Phil;
looks like your cat helped out as well!

thomas rubino wrote:Hey Phil;
looks like your cat helped out as well!

ohh those two are best buddies

Not EXACTLY in the house, but I have been known to brood ducks out in the garage from time to time.

We've had chicks in a kiddie pool, in the livingroom, and ducks in a huge dog crate, in the garage, and 4 grown goats in the bathroom, and a goat kid in our bed. We also had a bunny that free-ranged, in the house, and a pair of guinea pigs who live in about half of our TV room.

Not this year, and never again. One year I bought chicks. I always keep them in a bin in the house for a couple of weeks.  This time no one was living in the little mother-in-law house so I had them in there.  One day they got out, and ended up living in there for about a month.  I called it the chicken house.  There was no furniture, but it was still a major mess to clean up!

We occasionally had an orphan lamb or piglet in the house in a backroom corner being bottle fed.
One of my piglets was stepped on by the sow and had a perfect 1"X1" right angle tear in its hide and I asked my mother to sew it up. When that guy was grown you couldn't tell where the tear had been.

But, a word of CAUTION, animals cared for in the house can become pests when grown as they demand attention. One of our lambs grew really large and he always wanted to be petted. If he didn't get attention he would come up behind whomever was in the field and ram them in the legs bowling the person over.

Many years ago I was farm sitting for a neighbour while he went south with his family for a holiday. He assured me his goats weren’t due to give birth till May, This was March.  The family was gone about 5 days and I checked the barn early in the morning. It was -30 out, just had a snowstorm and the barn wall was broken to the nasty north wind. Came in the barn. It was utter disaster 5 kids born. They all looked dead. I ran with all these little bodies some were frozen already, ran to the cold house. No warm fire what to do? Turned on the hot water the tank had been turned off. Boiled some water on the stove, put babies in the sink of warm water, One by one.  Before that water was boiled I was heaving them in an arc over my shoulder. As I had seen in all the James Herriot episodes. Also in the books. Also had done it once before with a lamb at my parents farm.  Stuck my fingers in their mouths make sure their airways were clear.  Then put them all in the sink keeping their heads above water.  The frozen ones were gone. There were 3 I kept warm by adding warm water and massaging their hearts. Well there was life in 2 of them!  It was touch and go all day and night. These 2 were so tiny. They were not going back in that barn. They came home with me. They were fed with an eye dropper for the first week of their lives.  I milked a mom to get the needed colostrum. (First time milking ever)!  Took me forever to milk the rest of the times from unwilling mothers.
Needless to say Nubian goats sleeping in a basket next to my bed. Every peep they gave I would wake up and give them another eye dropper of milk.
Do you think after that I could give them back to the farmer?  No way!  They lived in the house in the bathroom as they got older. When they could jump on the toilet seat to the counter tops that was it! Our neighbor gave us their old log cabin piggery 100+ years old. We moved it here one Saturday and had out instant goat shed.  That was the beginning of my love for Nubians.  We ended up with 28 goats about 5 years later.