Goats

It was my birthday a month ago. I wouldn’t say I’ve reached that age where I’ve become difficult to buy for so it was odd to receive a book entitled “Licking Hitler: A Play for TV” and then a second titled “Shakesqueer: A Queer Guide to the Works of Shakespeare”. It was odder to find, tucked inside of the latter, a voucher for a goat husbandry course on which my mother had written the words “We all think it’s time you learnt some practical skills”.

In her defense I genuinely don’t have many practical skills, and I have occasionally expressed a fondness for goats. There is, I now realise, a horrible gulf between a fondness for goats (based mainly around their sideways eyes) and being possessed of a great desire to breed and rear them. This gulf was really brought home to me during the 7 hours that I spent standing in the muddied field of my local goat sanctuary with eleven other students, four hundred goats, and the owner who genuinely introduced himself as Goat-y Bob.

Goat-y Bob didn’t look like a goat, which came as a crushing disappointment. In terms of animals that humans can look like goats are a really easy one and I thought he might at least have made the effort. He did however look like a man who had seen some incredibly sobering things. Close contact with goats had, for some reason, given him the worn and haunted demenour of a Vietnam veteran. Every so often he would say or do something that gestured ominously to terrible goat-based events of the past. Such as trailing off part way through a sentence, staring into the middle distance, and whispering ‘Oh! Sorry! The memories!’. 

(In retrospect, this should have been a huge clue as to the horrible realities of goat care.)

When we arrived we formed a semi-circle in the goat pasture and as part of an introductory exercise we all stated how many goats we owned. As if we were traders in some antique society, each assessing the others wealth and bartering power.

“I’m John I have two goats.”

“My goats number three score and twain”

“I have countless goats in the valley, and two daughters of marriageable age”

When I told them I was goatless they all looked at me in confusion and pity and Goat-y Bob was forced to move proceedings on quickly, proclaiming...

"Ok, everyone! What's the first rule of goat husbandry?"

"Don't talk about goat husbandry?" I proffered.

"No!" he said, staring at me as if I'd made light of his life's work "No! The first rule of goat husbandry is if you let the goats get slightly too hot or slightly too cold they will all die! You have to keep your goats at a perfect ambient temperature."

This was the main lesson we were to be taught. Not this one fact but what it stood for more broadly... which is that, in spite of their reputation as hardy survivors, in spite of being reared throughout the world in a variety of less than hospitable climates, for thousands of years, goats are a stones throw away from complete oblivion at all times. 

I don’t know how the committee of people in charge of animal PR have managed to hide this fact from us all for so long, but they have. There wasn’t a job that we did that day that didn’t carry with it the constant and dreadful threat of potentially killing all the goats outright.

We were taught how much space to give them and then how to extract from that space all the myriad things that can and will poison them. Tree bark, wild flowers, certain breeds of grass. For an animal famous for eating everything, they can eat almost nothing.

On the flip side of this coin - if goats don’t eat for three days, due to poisoning, or possibly just a sudden whim, the bacteria responsible for their digestion denatures - and they die.

We were taught how to trim their hooves. Which they hate, they squirm and butt at you desperately trying to escape, but if you don’t do every day, their hooves become soft, sodden and eventually just rot away. Once goats feet have rotted off - they die.

To delouse goats you spread a blue unguent along the length of their spines and if you think they don’t sometimes die when you’re doing this you’re wrong, if you put slightly too much on, it’s absorbed into their bloodstream, then on into their brain. And - well... (very few things can survive poison in the brain.)

In light of this knowledge Goat-y Bob’s shell-shocked demenour suddenly made horrible logical sense. Here he was with over four hundred goats to care for and any one of them could potentially sicken and fade at a moments notice, like delicate Victorian heroines... but with horns.

Or, as another student termed them, goat-antlers.

By the time we were allotted a goat each to care for I was afraid to touch it. Though I did name it Wiggles, and let it trail about after me. At length I went to give it’s goat antlers a pat and Goaty Bob yelled across the yard “Don’t touch the base of the horns, they can snap off and leave an open hole in their heads.” I withdrew my hand quickly.

“How have you survived as a species?” I hissed at Wiggles, 

He looked up at me with brilliant little sideways eyes, blissfully ignorant of the abyss upon which he was perpetually balanced. 

He chewed happily at my hair and I extracted it from his mouth, fearing it would poison him.

I looked from his happy little goat face, to the haggered form of Goat-y Bob, whose eyes were darting from goat to goat, constantly checking that they were all extant. This was what you got, happy, carefree goats unaware of how death stalked them at every turn, and terribly terribly care-worn people, who were far too aware of it. If I had ever been seriously entertaining the notion of keeping these time-bombs, I wasn’t any longer.

In terms of practical skills though I am now if anything over-endowed. I can kill a goat, tell you what might be killing your goat, and I can predict the ways in which your healthy goat will shortly die. And if that’s not a highly applicable practical skill set, then, for what it is worth, I can also discourse at length on the homoerotic themes at the heart of Shakesqueerian cannon.