Getting One’s Goat By Scott Nicholson As a journalist, writer, gardener, guitar picker, and amateur astronaut, I get a lot of ideas. Most of those ideas eventually circle back around to a single question: “What in the world was I thinking?” Such is the latest chapter, one that began with a serious case of goat desire. Now, put aside those dirty hillbilly jokes for a moment; there’s plenty of time for them later. Three years ago, when I was looking for a house, I wanted enough property to have a goat pasture. I pictured myself as landed gentry, boots kicked up on the porch railing as I reflected on my bucolic, pastoral surroundings, the only sound a distant dog barking on a sultry summer eve. I ended up finding a place with a horse pasture on one side and a cow pasture on the other. Perfect, I imagined, though it took me a couple more years to finally make that dream come true. When I could no longer delay the inevitable, and my goat desire swelled into a fever, I took stock of the situation. Though I had fence on two sides of the property, I had to protect my garden and make sure my mobile investments wouldn’t wander down the road, so I decided on a lot about a third of an acre in size, much of it immediately surrounding my house. Four trips to the hardware store and about $250 later, I was ready to put in three full days of hard labor. Besides the fencing, I had to convert a covered play sandbox into a goat shed, which cost another $50, earned me several splinters, and cured me of perfectionism when, in defiance of all laws of physics, only three corners of the structure ended up perfectly square. “Good enough for goats,” became my new mantra. Picking the Perfect Goats Once everything seemed adequate, it was time for the all-important task of selection. I’d read a little about goats while researching my novel, “The Farm,” (buy it, as I desperately need royalty money for goat food), and I knew that generally there were dairy breeds, meat breeds, and fiber breeds. Apparently the fiber breeds don’t cotton much to these cold climates, despite their warm cashmere sweaters. And diary goats—well, you might find tugging teats twice a day like clockwork to be your idea of “healthy attachment,” but as a commitment phobe, I wanted something that would thrive on the neglect I typically bestow on all things in my immediate sphere of influence. So meat goats it would be. I shopped around in some fine papers published by Mountain Times Publications (my diligent search included at least three walks back to the press room for free papers), and found exactly what I thought I wanted. Two sisters, mostly Boer (a meat breed) crossed with Nubian (a long-necked diary breed). About 18 months old, they had both given birth a month before, though one of the kids didn’t make it. So I had a package deal, three for the price of two. Here, I mean “price,” as in what you pay for a new car. The “cost” comes when you have to put fuel in the tank, change the oil, buy tires, pay for insurance, etc. Another $200 and I was in the goat business. And, yes, it absolutely had to be a business. I figured that, at the rate I was losing money, this needed to be a tax-deductible enterprise. I did multiplication tables in my head: a 120-day gestation period, they go into heat every three or four weeks, all I had to do was buy a buck (popularly known as a “Billy Goat”) and I could produce six or more goats a year. In the type of irresponsible mathematics that led to my becoming a liberal arts major, I quickly calculated that I could turn a profit in 228 years. Because buying goats is only the beginning. Then you need a salt block ($6), some goat pellets or other type of feed ($10 a sack), a trip to the vet for a hoof infection ($16), and plenty of hay. Buy your hay before winter, or you’ll run out. And you do not want to run out, even with hay pushing $8 a bale, rivaling the wholesale cost of illegal, imported, and non-USDA-approved herb. I have a compost pile for my garden, but now all my table scraps go to the goats. It’s true goats will eat most anything—they even tried to eat a piece of newspaper that blew into the goat lot. I think it was only a bland episode of “Family Circus” that stopped them. Leek greens? Good enough for goats. Potato peels? Ditto. Coffee grounds? Well, haven’t tried that one yet. I’m not sure I want to see a goat on caffeine. One bit of advice I received was, “There’s no fence in the world that will keep a goat in.” “No problem,” I thought. My neighbors’ fences had served horses and cows just fine for decades. It’s the kind known in these parts as “hawg war,” though Northern agronomists refer to it as “hog wire.” So imagine my delight to arrive home one snowy evening to find one of the sisters with her horns securely caught in the wire while the other was standing on the other side of the trampled fence, blissfully eating a crabapple tree. Goat Smarts Goats have a reputation for intelligence. Their intelligence borders on deviant cunning. The Latin “capra,” for “goat,” is the root of the word “capricious,” which means “whimsical, fanciful, quirky, apt to change suddenly.” But apparently that doesn’t include “having a good memory,” because they got their heads caught three times in the wire. Another two trips to the store and another $100 and I had covered all the hog wire, which has openings four inches square, with 2”x 4” wire. No goat can squeeze through that. No, they have to mash, stomp, and rub it into submission instead. Incidentally, throw in another $15 for a tetanus booster, because you’ll constantly be cutting your hands on the wire. About Haylessness Now, you may be wondering about the dire consequences of haylessness, to which I earlier alluded. The sisters were “middling tame” when I got them, meaning they would come up to you if you had a bucket of sweet oats and cracked corn. Soon their tentative dips into the bucket were accompanied by bleats of yearning. That yearning, if left unfulfilled, soon yielded to astonishingly deep bellows. In short, the language of affection we developed became a one-way demand: “Gimme food right this second or you will never sleep again.” This natural process of selection (get rid of the noisiest goat first) will guide my business strategy. Most farmers would simply eat her, but I made the mistake of naming my goats. I did ask at a local meat center if they had any goat meat, because I couldn’t slaughter my own, as much as I was tempted on one particular Sunday at 6 a.m. Besides, even at $50 a gourmet pound, purchasing it had to be cheaper than raising it myself. No goat meat available, I was told, though I did learn, “If you’ve eaten deer, you’ve eaten goat.” So I can’t eat the goats (I don’t want to name them here, because that makes them even more real and fixed in my life, but let’s refer to them as “The Bellower,” “The Butthead,” and “Gimpy”). Oh, how I wish I were more ruthless and bloodthirsty, because The Bellower is teaching Gimpy how to beg, and The Butthead pushes The Bellower away from all the food, thus making The Bellower do her thing ever more stridently, which in turn riles Gimpy, and before you know it, my house sounds like a barnyard. And all I wanted was a little bit of peace and quiet in the country. Nevertheless, my scheming became more expansive. I could probably buy that piece of property across from me for about $15,000, just the right size for a small herd and loaded with juicy briars. Then I’d need a pickup truck, so figure another $10,000. And I wanted a huge boulder shipped in so the goats could climb on it, and that would cost $1,000 for renting the heavy equipment, and I’d need about a half mile of fencing for the new lot and… Okay, I’m sure you’re ready to join the fun. Lean on your local resources like the N.C. Cooperative Extension Service, the New River Zoo, Southern States, and goat breeders. Not just to learn; you will need somebody to blame for all your goat problems. It’s all their faults because they didn’t warn you strongly enough. And I will fail to warn you, too. Because I happen to have a goat for sale. It’s cute, affectionate, full of fun, only eats 38 times a day, is house broken, respects boundaries, and is fluent in four languages that end in “aaah.” With a small, tax-deductible purchase, you, too, can enter goat business. Come by and pick her up any time. Just ignore the little sign hanging on my gate: “Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.”