Not all that goes with freshening goats is pleasure. This is the farm, not the pet store.

In some parts of the San Fernando Valley, the arrival of spring is signaled by the tender voices of newborn goats summoning their mothers.

There is something as fresh and fragile as the flowers of spring in that sound and in the sight of the kid bouncing at its mother’s side.

That’s probably why the birth of a goat is called a freshening.

But not all that goes with freshening goats is idyllic pleasure. This is the farm, not the pet store.

To ease its less seasoned members through the tougher moments of their first freshening, the West Valley Valley Dairy Goat Improvement Assn. gave a clinic in goat care one recent Sunday at a member’s home in Woodland Hills.

The subject was “How to make your goat a more suitable companion.”

In goat vocabulary that meant “How to brand, dehorn and castrate your goat.”

That has to be done because an unaltered buckling, as young male goats are called, grows up to be an aggressive 200-pound buck.

“That’s an awful thing to have around,” said Sue Thie, a champion dairy goat breeder. The altered ones are smaller and gentler.

In the dairy herd, baby males, except the rare one kept for breeding stock, are often eliminated right off the bat or sold for meat.

But a lot of dairy goat owners just don’t like the thought of blood, Thie said. So they try to find homes for their bucklings as pets.

First they have to make them good pets. To find out how to do that, about a dozen women and two young men came to Thie’s half-acre ranch.

Only an hour before the demonstration began, a mother goat had freshened inside the barn.

“We planned to have a freshening during the meeting, but she beat us to that,” Thie said.

The two new kids huddled near their mother in the hay.

They were still too young for the demonstration. Instead, Thie used a couple of older kids. The subjects cried out as Thie collared them.

First she showed how to hold the kid. Margaret Miller, president of the association, assisted. She flopped a kid on its back in her lap and cradled it the way a mother might cradle a baby while changing its diapers, clasping a front and a hind leg in each of her hands.

The buckling whimpered pitifully, for its mother didn’t come. Thie showed the audience a hypodermic needle.

“This is lidocaine, just like your dentist uses when you have a tooth filled,” she said.

The buckling wiggled as the needle went in. Thie said the injection was the only thing the animal would feel.

Then she held up a device called the “Elasticator.” It was a sort of pliers with four prongs that stretched a heavy rubber band open about an inch.

“The most important thing you have to do is count to two,” Thie said. “If you miss one, all your effort will be wasted.”

She counted carefully and then the rubber band went snap and the buckling trotted off.

“When the lidocaine wears out, the circulation will already be cut off and he won’t feel a thing,” she said.

The Elasticator is preferred by most dairy goat owners because it’s clean and easy, Thie said. Even more decisive is a gadget called Frank’s Emasculator. Thie held one up. It looked a bit like a stainless steel garlic crusher, with a little blade. Thie said many goat hobbyists avoid the Emasculator because it sometimes produces “leakage.” That was her word for blood.

As she demonstrated, a reporter who had been craning to see from the rear quietly stepped away to sit on a piece of farm equipment.

A pleasant looking teen-ager walked over to keep him company.

It was Thie’s son, David. He said he had been active with the goats when his mother first started keeping them.

“But then I got older and found different interests,” he said. “I stay very much clear of the animals.”

His mother, meanwhile, had moved onto removing the beginnings of horns, which is called disbudding.

Thie’s husband, Dean, helped. He brought out a portable oxygen torch to heat a copper-tipped iron.

“It’ll get kind of red hot, cherry colored,” he said.

Thie had placed a kid into a narrow white box with a notch for the animal’s neck. She sat over the box to hold it in place.

When the iron was hot, her husband handed it to her and grabbed the kid by the snout.

There was a hiss and a small cloud of smoke rose from the horn buds.

“The object is to get this done and off as soon as possible,” Thie said. “Quite obviously, they don’t like it.”

She stood up, and the goat popped out of the box and bounded away, a better companion.