My Experience with Goats

Everyone I know enjoys bringing home a new kid. So, bringing home two must be twice as nice, right?

I was happily working one day when my wife called informing me that she wanted to buy two goats (I bet you didn’t think this story was going there). She figured they would eat the weeds in the field behind our house. I thought this sounded like a good idea because I used this field as a driving range, and I seemed to lose more balls than I retrieved.

So, upon my arrival home we took the minivan for a short drive to a friend’s home, gave them $50 and found ourselves strapping diapers on two very cute furry kids. Neither my wife nor I had cared for goats before, and we were excited to have these adorable baby animals coming to our house. As you can imagine, our children were even more excited than we were. Let me share our experience with these little goats and whether our excitement sizzled or fizzled as we became schooled in the art of raising goats.

The first lesson we learned was the realization that goats have a lot of poop and not a lot of restraint. On the way home some of the little poop nuggets, as I like to call them, slipped out of the diapers (that were made for humans, not goats) and scattered around our vehicle. The saving grace was the fact goat poop is formed in nice little balls or nuggets and was not runny and messy. The clean up after getting home was not too difficult. Plus, the little boogers were so adorably cute, I didn’t mind that my wife had to clean up a little poop. (If you’re wondering, I’m joking…I helped clean the poop.)

The second lesson we learned was that our goats were not interested in the type of weeds in our field and were intensely interested in eating the green grass from our lawn. If we put them near the grass, they would stretch as far as they could to get half a bite of green grass while passing on the endless amounts of weeds available to them. If we let them off the cables for a moment, they ran toward the green grass on the lawn. I can’t really blame them, but it definitely defeated the purpose of having the goats clean up the weeds in the field.

The third lesson learned is that our goats loved attention. If we even thought about going outside, they would start bleating like crazy trying to get our attention. At first it was cute, but soon become somewhat annoying. Plus, they were persistent. Ignoring them did nothing to make them stop.

When we did give them attention, they would sprint toward us. The bad part was they were attached to a thirty-foot cable on a collar which was staked to the ground on the other end. When the goats sprinted toward us and the slack in the cable ended, they would immediately stop, and their bodies would fly up in the air and they would slam to the ground. Of course, we felt terrible about this and were worried they would break their neck, so we decided to go with plan B.

Plan B leads us to our fourth lesson about goat raising, and that is the fact that goats can be a pain. Plan B involved buying a wire fence and some green T posts and building a pen. The pen solved the cable problem, but it also was much more difficult to move around. And it didn’t stop the never ending crying every time we went outside. Plus, it didn’t take long before the goats figured out how to bend down the fence and jump over it and run to the back door. I don’t know how many times we had goats knocking on our back door trying to get our attention. I’m just glad they didn’t break the glass in the door. It also wasn’t long before our neighbor who had horses would call us telling us our goats were in with their horses. It seemed like every time we left the house, we came home to a game we called, “find the goats”.

After months of trying to be good goat caretakers, we sadly realized goats were not compatible with our current situation. We found a farm that had lots of animals and gave them away to a good family where the goats lived the remainder of their lives eating green grass with a bunch of new friends. Or they ended up being the main course at a BBQ. We really don’t know. (Once again, I’m joking.)

So that’s the short version of my adventure with goats. Even though they were very cute and friendly animals, we decided it was best to send them to a place that would provide them with a better life. If you are planning on getting goats for your hobby farm, just know they can be a lot of work and somewhat annoying at times.