Not many people would have realised it, but yesterday was a fine day for getting your goats dry.
Wynn Cruickshank, of Shingle Creek, near Roxburgh, certainly did, and by sundown was expecting to have a dozen Boer goats washed, dried and smelling as sweet as a freesia.
Mr Cruickshank, one of the partners of Shingle Creek Chevron, was preparing the goats for the Upper Clutha A&P Show in Wanaka, which starts on Friday.
The male goats are just entering the rutting season and they tend to smell a bit, Mr Cruickshank says.
''They make themselves pretty obnoxious.''
One way of combating the smell is to keep the bucks away from the does - but that only stalls the process for a short time.
Once the weather starts to feel autumnal, the goats start to feel like rutting.
Mr Cruickshank says Boer goats are generally quite clean and ''pristine white'' and do not have a smell. The ''very, very strong odour'' of the bucks during the rutting season comes from an oil that spreads through their coats, he says.
''You have got to wash it out in order to show them because we don't want them stinking while on public display.''
Mr Cruickshank is showing four adult does, two adult bucks and an entourage of yearlings and kids, all of which must be washed to bring out the contrast in the colours of their coats.
''If you wash them, the contrast is much more obvious.''
Mr Cruickshank, who said he was almost 70, planned to keep on washing goats until the sun went down and it got too cool for them to dry, and when spoken to by the Otago Daily Times still had one or two goats to catch.
The Shingle Creek operation provides goat meat to six restaurants in Wellington and Queenstown and its products will be available at the Wanaka show as well.
