The Beacon Hill Children's Farm with all its animal and human members is saying goodbye to Mona.
Mona – a very “lady like” goat – was always very popular and well liked due to her calming nature and her great smile.
Mona was born in 2001 here at the farm. She spent some great years here as a mother goat and was pregnant 5 times. She retired from breeding in 2009, and left the farm for a few years. She and her friend Ailise were adopted and went to live in quiet retirement on a different farm. In 2013 Mona returned to us and as she then was our second oldest goat, she became one of the “3 old ladies”.
Mona was one of the most relaxed and easygoing goats in our petting area. She enjoyed a rather quiet life, just loved sleeping in the sunshine or in a nice corner of the barn. Through her calm personality she was loved very much by all the visitors. No matter if it were children who just stopped by to pet and brush her or adults who sat with her to share a relaxing moment – she thanked everyone with a huge smile that showed off her last remaining front tooth. Mona was famous for her “one tooth smile”.
Mona had a very friendly and sunny temperament, and was also rather submissive in our goat herd (at her age of course she wasn’t a big fighter). So it worked perfectly for her that her best friend was Orchid; at the time the leader of the herd. They loved to hang out together and Orchid always took good care of Mona. That’s what friends are for!
Her two favorite times of the day were easy to guess: NAP TIME and FEEDING TIME! She was an expert in trying to sneak into all the different stalls and eat all the leftover food. She wouldn’t let anything go to waste.
Even though she was the second oldest goat in the petting area, she very often fooled people with her rather big belly. She certainly looked very pregnant, but she was not. That belly was just a result from several prior pregnancies over the years and as goats are ruminants, they have bigger looking tummies anyway. But her “pregnant look” earned her lots of great belly rubs and she was definitely grateful for them.
In the spring of 2016 Mona and Peg, our oldest goat, became companions and they got along really well. Both liked it rather quiet, needed lots of naps and shared the same food. Unfortunately this companionship was cut short in the fall of the same year, when Mona became sick and wouldn’t eat well anymore. Since her diagnosis had no option for treatment and she would have been contagious to the other goats, we had to put her down.
Mona with her great smile will be greatly missed by all of us. RIP Mona.
September 2016