Complete and Utter Failure

Well, this is the only photo I was able to get of yesterday's attempted "neck bleed."

Let's just get this out of the way.  We failed.  We TOTALLY failed.  Honey was not decapitated (as she had been in my nightmare), but she does have a bare patch on her neck and wounds from several needle pricks.  :(

Knowing that I would have to do this as soon as John got home from work, I'd been psyching myself up for it all afternoon.  I read and reread the directions. Somehow, though, it's just hard to visualize exactly how it should be done when you're translating from written directions.

Once we'd gathered all our materials and discussed our game plan, we had no other excuse to put it off, so we had to commence the "neck bleed" attempt.
While John restrained Honey, I shaved a patch on her neck so that I could find her jugular vein.  Then, I attempted to draw the blood.  She was unamused by it all and was very jumpy, as was I.  Long story short, we had a crucial step of the process wrong and never got the blood sample. 

We gave up (hopefully before we traumatized her too terribly), came inside, and I promptly had an emotional breakdown.  What can I say?  I love my goats.

 I'd worked myself all up to be prepared to jab them in the neck in order to get that much-needed blood sample.  But, to jab my favorite goat in the neck multiple times and still not get the sample was just too much for me.

Anyway, once I'd settled down a bit and realized that we were going to have to figure out how to do this, I did a little searching and came up with this VERY helpful video.  Watch it if you're interested in seeing exactly how it's done. 

It was very obvious to me as I watched the video what step I'd been doing wrong, so I'm hoping for a better result when we try again this afternoon.