Goats… where do I even begin?
Goats are a fun livestock to have. They’re energetic, playful, and most definitely the social butterflies of the farm. However, there are some things you can’t learn about them from the internet.
Here’s a list of things nobody told me about owning goats:
- They eat EVERYTHING
- Sure, you may be able to find this little bit of information to be pretty common knowledge. However, you will never know exactly how true it is until you bring back your first goats, peer out the window, and see them eating the siding off of your barn. Everyone always talks about how they will eat any food they can get ahold of, but metal and plastic? It seems like a stereotype for kids’ books! Alas, it’s real life, and now you need to fix your barn.
- …Except what you want them to
- Goats are the most temperamental animals you can have on your farm. No matter what you want them to do, chances are good they’ll do the exact opposite. They’ll ignore the patches of weeds and forage in their pasture for days in favor of escaping to eat your vegetable garden. And when the growing season is over and you give them the leftovers? Conveniently they don’t want it anymore. They’re allowed to eat it, and that’s no fun. They’ll try to escape for months to get to the bushes outside their pasture, but the day you fence them in for them to eat, suddenly they’re unappetizing. Not only do they ignore the plants you want them to eat, but they also destroy the ones you don’t. The flowers that have been growing alongside their pen undisturbed for a year? Kiss them goodbye the day you decide to move them to a pot. The goats will telepathically know your plan and eat them to the ground within an hour. No matter what you do, they will always find a way to win your mind games, so plan accordingly (if that’s even possible).
- They poop. A LOT!
- Goats are the eating machines of the animal world, and what goes in has to come back out eventually. This means rabbit pellet sized poops all over the place. The barn? Most definitely. The pasture? Good luck trying to clean it up. Your back porch? Probably there too. They seem to be inescapable. Every time you clean your barn and think you’ve gotten them all out, you find another pile hiding in the corner, scattered pellets in the water bucket, and, surprise, they pooped in the hay too.
- No fence is good enough.
- You might go into owning goats with confidence, but when I tell you thirty minutes in you’re going to doubt yourself, believe me. It will take a goat thirty minutes at most to survey your entire setup and find its weak points. Those thirty minutes are a false security for you because “look, Billy the goat is still in his pen” will surely turn into “let me just go inside really quick and grab a snack,” and that’s when he’ll strike. You’ll come back outside to your new goat eating your neighbor’s petunias, and they are not happy. In addition to buying your neighbor a new garden, you’ll also be off to the feed store to find new fencing, which surely won’t work either because your goat will just end up escaping that one too. You’ll go through way too many different fences and setups until your goat randomly decides that setup number 11 will keep them contained for a while. However, don’t get too comfortable. Every other full moon they’ll suddenly develop the ability to walk through walls and you’ll be chasing them in your underwear… again.
- Some of them have a height sensor.
- For some reason, certain goats have the ability to tell a person’s exact height just by looking at them. These goats will be completely normal and friendly when people of a decent height are in the pasture, however the second a much shorter person or a child walks in they turn into bulldozers. Chances are you won’t know if your goat has a height sensor either. You’ll assume all is well until your boss wants to take her niece to visit the farm, or your insurance agent is especially short. Oops.
- They’re bulletproof… except for when they’re not.
- Goats have this weird ability to be largely unaffected by things that would kill any other animal. Hit in the head by another goat? They’re fine. Got into an entire bag of the wrong feed? They’ll just be a little chubby later. Decided to taste some quickcrete? No worries, they’re still okay. However, this superpower also has the side effect of being extremely affected by very minor things. Buck eats too much grain? Better call the vet, you’ve got uroliths. Wrong plant in the pasture? Have fun cleaning up after scours. With big situations causing minor problems and minor situations causing drastic issues, sometimes goats seem like they couldn’t make any less sense.
Overall, goats are a very interesting animal to have. They’re silly, energetic, and have more personality in their left hoof than most other livestock do in their entire bodies. Of course, with great personality, comes great potential for troublemaking. This is just a short list of the things nobody told me before buying my first goat, but I’m sure there will be more to come. They like to keep me on my toes.
It’s best to be prepared when taking on the ownership of one of these crazy creatures, but there are just some things you’ll never learn from the internet.
Hayyy Farms 