The Third Farm Animal: One Goat, Then Two Goats
“Do You Have Goats?”…
Surprisingly, one of the first questions many people would ask when we told them about our homestead farm life was “Do you have goats?”
Why would we have goats?! There’s no good reason to have goats. Cows? Of course, yes…for someone to raise and then take somewhere else someday to turn into…beef. (More on that another day.)
Here’s what happened. True story. We rented out the pasture for cows, because remember about NOT having any pets and only having working animals? So the gentleman who brings the cows one day shows up with a few more cows, and…yep, a goat. He said at the sale barn auction it somehow got included in the deal without him realizing it. We’re not too familiar with sale barns, so we don’t have much to say about that 🙂
So we choose to let the goat stay and eat the weeds for us. The weeds that the cows don’t touch, which was most of them at the time, plus a lot of weeds were in places we didn’t want the cows.
We named this goat Matilda. She was young – we never knew her actual age – and we tethered her close to whatever weeds we didn’t want. And so she was very pleasant, almost like a nice dog. And she ate just about every weed she could find. Wonderful!
So far, so good. But…
She also cried – a lot. Now we don’t know what it’s officially called when goats…well, we don’t know what it’s called. But envision hearing “meh”. Or when she’s bored with her weeded area, a drawn-out “mehhh”. But when she’s REALLY bored? “MEEEHHHH! MEEEHHHH! MEEEHHHH!…..”
Imagine how enjoyable that is to listen to for a while… 😀 then 🤪 then 😳. And then when it keeps going on too long, you start thinking of things you’ve never thought before, like “is this normal?” or “what’s wrong with this animal” or “now I know why Jesus talked about sheep and goats” or, after some experience, “what am I missing here?”
And thus, welcome to Goat Number Two. Hopefully we can find a picture of Billy one day, but you can see them both here:
Why two goats? Because as we quickly learned, goats and sheep do much better when they have a companion.
Speaking of sheep…
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