We brought home our first goat Tuesday!  We're planning on getting a second goat this week (who's all picked out --- more on her later), but for the day, goat #1 got to be an only child.  She also appears to be nameless --- we're taking suggestions if you can think of just the right appellation for our farm's first caprine resident.

Names aside, goat #1 wasn't entirely thrilled at spending two hours winding down country roads in the backseat of our car, but she only bleated a few times.  Once we disembarked, though, the struggles began.  As total neophytes to goat wrangling, we hadn't considered the species' extreme aversion to water, so we chose to bring home goat #1 on a day when the creek was about knee high and the floodplain was one big mass of puddles.  Our nanny was just starting to get the hang of walking on a leash when we came to the first body of water...and then she decided that being dragged was superior to walking.  I ended up carrying the poor (and heavy) beast about halfway up the floodplain, stopping to drag and cajole her through drier spots, and the goat and I were both pretty tuckered out by the time we got home.

Poor Mark had just driven for two hours in heavy rain with goat horns jabbing him in the back of the head, so he wasn't much better off.  Still, he managed to leash Lucy and take her for a walk, then to introduce our obedient dog to the new goat with no major trauma on either side.  We'll do a more serious training session later, but I'm about 75% sure our smart farm dog got the message --- goats are to be protected, not chased.  (Rolling in their manure, though, is definitely high on Lucy's list.)

Before shutting our new nanny away in the starplate coop for her much-deserved rest, I let her browse some oat cover crops (which she probably would have eaten all day if I'd let her, but I started getting worried about bloat even though that probably wouldn't be a problem at this time of year).  A few feet further down the trail (with the goat walking nicely now that we were out of the marsh), she found a fenceline covered with Japanese honeysuckle and began to chow down --- or, rather, to daintily pick the leaves off the stems, proving that she may be a goat, but that she's also a lady.

Once our nanny saw the dry straw inside the coop, though, all thoughts of food were forgotten.  I brought Unnamed Goat some stalks from sweet corn, sorghum, and sunflowers to tide her over until morning, then shut her in so she could begin learning her new home.

My conclusions so far?  Goats --- even ones with long horns --- are extremely gentle even when manhandled.  And their ability to eat the weeds is very satisfactory.  Only time will tell how well we work the species into our farm, but I'm excited to begin to learn the ways of goats.

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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.



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