Its hard to get past the goats on Glean Gabhra.
There were over a hundred of them, a hundred and fifty if you counted the
bleating kids who wanted nothing more than to be constantly fed either hay,
kibbles or the sweaty end of my shirt.
Our jobs, really all jobs with animals, really only involved
two basic concepts: food in, shit out.
Each morning we had to measure out portions of the
equivalent of kibbles and bits for goats into planting trays (for the goats
would destroy anything else less sturdy), serve the most delicious hay (the
stinky silage was for the older goats) and give ‘em all fresh straw. I was
amazed at how much the little creatures could eat. We’d feed them at 9:00, and
by 10:00 their food all be gone.
I brought this to the attention of Dominic who told me to
start ratcheting up their food intake. The sooner they get up to weight, the
sooner they can get off milk, the sooner we could put them all in one big pen
instead of 8 smaller ones. They were kept in smaller pins for two reasons: one,
the slats in the pallets they had for walls could actually contain them, and
two, if they were to all stay in the same one, it would be impossible to give
them all milk.
We were also especially eager to get them all into one central
pen because then we wouldn’t have to water them all by hand. There was no hose
nearby, so the only way to get them all water was to fill up two buckets, one
for each hand, and carry it to them. This quickly became my least favorite
chore.
“Entire cities have risen and fallen because people didn’t
have to carry water!” I’d rail on, while Raquel would grunt and fill another
bucket for the goats. But I understood why we couldn’t mix them, they were
always so voraciously hungry. One pen was so monstrously excitable one of them
managed to snag her ear on the handle of the bucket and rip her tag clean off!
And the little monster didn’t even mind, she just kept slurping away, her
bloody ear painting half of her face like the goat version of Rambo.
My favorite of the little goats though, was one of what
Dominic affectionately called the Gremlins. The Gremlins were the free range
goats. There were about six of them, and they’d all come to be Gremlins for different
reasons, some were born early or late so were too big or small to mix in with
the others, some hadn’t been dehorned, but they were all equally adept at escaping
their pens.
I spent an entire afternoon rounding up gremlins. Well, not
exactly. To concentrate on catching a goat that knows you want to catch it is
to concentrate on finding the end of a rainbow. Ain’t gonna happen. So instead,
whenever Raquel and I were deep in conversation, or Dominic was asking me to do
a new task, I’d lunge out and snag a gremlin. By the afternoon they were all
penned up, until the next morning when I discovered that five of the six I’d
worked so hard at catching had escaped. One even seemed to like the game. She
followed us everywhere, and responded to any grabs by snuggling. We named her
Peggy Sue, and we love her.
Another day I had to try my hand at wrangling adult goats.
17 of them were Dominic’s herd, and the other 80 or so were all recently
purchased, so he kept them separate because
that was about the size of a milking batch. This all worked great until
Tato (His finest and goatiest goat) managed to open her gate and lead her crew
to mingle with the goats from Holland.
Dominic asked if I could round them up, and to my credit, I
got about a dozen of them. I chased them down, cut them off, cornered them and
finally corralled them away from the herd and back to their pen. I was
sweating, tired and angry that a bunch of animals whose big questions about the
universe can be answered by chewing on it, had managed to out-maneuver me! I
simply didn’t have the emotional fortitude or the physical energy to chase the
rest down.
So what did Dominic do? He all but looked at the last ones
and they walked over.
“Its in the eyes, see.” He tells me.
I guess that means I fall somewhere else on the food chain,
but I still think he was messing with me. He’s got those goats trained to show
city-kids how to break a sweat, the only ploy I should’ve seen through was
Dominic’s.
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