13. February 2010 by admin.

I must, at this point, tell you of my first encounter with a goat. And no, not one of those old goats (we all know at least one), but this was a very young one. Love was her name. And I’ll tell you about her name, too.

Pat gave the spanish hornless doe her name. She was mostly white, with a black splash of color on her forehead which could have been taken for a heart. Hence her name. And, as with all other beasts that have been in our care, it fit her.

Love was a character from day one. She had been weaned a couple of months when we bought her at a flea market we frequented at that time. She rode home in my lap, screaming bloody murder all the way home. All 45 miles of the trip. I became grateful she was so young and that she didn’t have horns. If she had horns I surely would have literally wound up with my eyes poked out (yeah, sure, mom always warned me about that kind of thing…but she never ever told me not to put a goat in my lap!). It was bad enough I practically had whiplash three times over on the trip home. Not to mention a ringing ear from“baa, baa, baa” during the entire ride. That girl had an impressive, healthy set of lungs.

When we finally got her home, of course we had to build her a proper pen since, as was so often the case, we weren’t prepared for her. In those early days on the farm we never planned on bringing anyone home. It just kind of impulse farming.

When Love first came home we put her in the chicken pen we had. It was replete with two roosting areas that can only jokingly be referred to as coops. It was all temporary, and it worked for the few chickens we had at that time. But even the larger of the “coops” was never designed for a goat. But Love didn’t care. As I said, she was young. But she was still a goat.

You must visualize here. The “coop” was about 3 1/2 feet tall, with a wood shelf about halfway up between the ground and the top of the shelter. It was maybe 1 ½ feet wide. All of it composed of pine and thin plywood.

One day we went outside and looked and looked for Love. We must have looked for and called her for a good half hour. Surely she couldn’t have escaped. I suggested to Pat we might start scouring the neighborhood for the little girl. After all, she might get hurt out there with the neighborhood dogs roaming about. We were just about to leave the back yard when we heard “baa. Baa” soft and low. Not a troubled bleating at all. In retrospect it might have been a goat’s version of a snicker.

We continued to search for the source of this snickering, and found love hidden in the chicken coop, on the shelf, not stuck, just comfy as an afghan hound on a plush couch and pretty as you please. When we first laid eyes on her in amazement, her only response was to look at us with her vertical pupils. “Here I am dad. Looking for me?” I couldn’t decide if we were laughing so hard because of where she’d gotten into or because we were relieved.

We finally built her a large pen just for her. She became daddy’s girl. She loved to play hide and seek and tag with me. I would run around a shelter we’d built for her and she would run around the same structure going the opposite way. When she and I would encounter each other I would slap my knees to the fronts of my thighs and make a silly noise. She would rear up on her hind legs, standing a few feet away from me. If it were anyone else I would be well advised to get the hell out of there. But Love never threatened to harm me or Pat. In fact, just the opposite, at least once she actually saved me from harm.

We had, at one point, gotten another female goat whose name evades me at this moment. Pat, I am sure, being one with a vastly superior memory for such things, will remind me after she reads this post. But since she reads after I post it publicly, and I generally don’t revise my postings unless I catch a spelling or grammatical error after the fact, we will never know the other doe’s name unless I put it in a later dated page.

It’s an important thing to note that by this time Love was fully grown. And the largest goat we’d ever owned since spanish are full-sized caprines.

Anyway, as I recall it this other young lady didn’t especially like me. No, I don’t know why, but she didn’t. She usually just stayed away from me, but I guess this one day she felt especially ornery. I walked into the pen to feed the girls. I could see it in her eyes that she was seeing red that day (I think her name was Pretty Lady, but I couldn’t swear to it), leading me to believe that she might be part bull. Be that as it may, I started to leave the pen and she started to run at me. Now, she may have been no more of a pest were she not fully horned. And she knew full well how to hurt with those horns. Love actually got between me and the other doe, giving me time to get out with both my pride and my body fully intact.

I have to mention just a couple of other things in her memory, since I just know she’s looking over my shoulder. Love really, really like plums. We had two plum trees within her sight, and during spring, when those trees were loaded with the red treasures, each day when Pat and I came to pick those small fruit, Love looked on longingly. She wasn’t going to let us go back inside without making us feel guilty if we didn’t give her at least a few of the red fruits. She would especially like it when we would get a couple of windy days, cause that would mean a bumper crop for her taste-buds.

The other thing I want to mention is more of a caution. You folks that have raised goats know this, but for those, like me, who didn’t understand the signs, if your goat stops eating his or her usual diet for more than a couple of days, please, please, buy some worming feed. I didn’t realize the problem till it was too late to save her life. I have been wracked by guilt since we lost her, but it’s so important for you to worm your livestock susceptible to worms. Especially when you have someone in your life as special as Love was to us. That 6 years went by way too quickly. I do miss her terribly. I hope she will speak to me when I see her in Heaven.

I need to tell you about her and Godzilla, but I haven’t even started to skim the surface with that young man. Later for that.

Well, that was a long-winded posting. Until next time, dear reader, smile. It could be worse. With all this snow, be grateful it’s not doing it in July.

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3. February 2010 by admin.

Scamper was our first cat. As so many felines are, Scamper was abandoned as a tyke. He not only was barely weaned, but was torn from his mother before he was completely able to eat solid food. Pat, having worked in that pet supply store (since I have nothing good to say about this major chain, as it treats its employees not quite as well as cattle on a ranch, and has as much contempt for it’s customers, though it fawns to them like a court jester, they shall remain unnamed), voted herself as most likely to take him home. And she did.

Being my first up-close and personal experience with a cat, I was fascinated by this little guy. And little he was; in fact, tiny would not be incorrect. He literally fit inside a beer six-pack container, which is what he came home in. I don’t know if he drank all the beer, but the case was empty aside from this “defenseless” creature. Now, you’ll notice I put the word defenseless in brackets. There is a reason for this. You cannot walk around naked with a kitten in the same house. Especially if you’re a guy. If you’ve never been in the presence of a very young cat, you’ve never known the sheer delight of their claws. And they like to bat at things with their paws. All the more so if they dangle. Gentlemen, are you starting to get the picture? I can see some of you running to get your drawers on, so I think I’ve said enough to forewarn you. A kitten is precious, but they will tenderize any meat that comes near them.

Another thing I noticed about cats is it takes very little to keep them entertained. If you have your clothes on (which, as indicated above, I highly recommend), all you have to do is throw a balled-up piece of paper, and they’ll be on it like sailors seeing their first woman after six-months at sea. (Okay, so I could have described that differently, but what fun would that be? I am not writing this from a priest’s perspective.)

During the first few days with Scamper, I continued to learn a lot about felines. For instance, when a cat plays, it’s genetically not possible for them to not attack the object of their playing. A hand gets clawed, scored and bitten, albeit gently in the case of Scamper. I began to understand why they like mice so well. His head fit into Pat’s hand, and like any cat, he loved to have his head scruffed. Being still small, we tried to be as gentle as possible with him. It would have been nice had he returned the favor. Even being gentle, Scamper still had razors in his paws, and he hadn’t yet figured out how to control them.

Fast-forward to his adulthood. This tiny creature grew into a domestic cat that obviously had quite a few big-cat genes. He developed a dimpled nose and a pouch on him that would make a lion envious. But despite his largess, there was not an ounce of fat that didn’t need to be there. He was active, but as we added more cats, his stature as our elder states-cat never changed. He rarely got into tiffs with the other cats, nor was he challenged by anyone else. The only one with whom he ever had an argument was Princess, our second-in-command.

Princess got her name because she acted like one. She was a beautifully marked ring-tail patch siamese, and she knew she was gorgeous. In fact, were she human she would be the exact kind of woman that would turn me off because I hate that attitude, even if she was the perfect eye-candy, But Princess had claimed me as her person, and all it took was her curling up in a tight little ball on my lap and I was hooked. This beautiful little kitty, who, while weaned when she came home a couple of weeks after Scamper’s triumphant arrival, was not very much larger than Scamper was when he came to live with us, had me hook, line and sinker. I absolutely fell in love with cats. I’ve been a cat person ever since. In fact, I have seen a mug in a catalogue which had the imprint “ask me about the cute thing my cat did, because I’ll tell you anyway”, or words to that effect. Truer words were never spoken. A person smitten by a cat is worse than a first-time father. I could blather on about Princess for hours. Eventually people would see me coming and remember they had an appointment in another county they had to attend to.

The last thing I’ll mention about Princess was her agility. I know all cats are agile to the nth degree, but Princess was remarkable. At one time we had a pile of boxes in the living room at 6 feet high. I could see her calculate how much distance she would have to leap to get to the top of the boxes. In my mind’s eye she was figuring out wind-speed, azimuth and translating that into effort. And all this without having to build a computer. Princess cost us nothing to bring home. How much did it cost NASA to build a calculator to figure this out? Now, who’s smarter?

Both Scamper and Princess have since gone on to their eternal reward, but I will forever be grateful to my Princess for teaching me that one of the most rewarding things in the world is being owned by a cat. And believe me, they own you. Just ask them.

Ciao for now dear reader. Until next time, may you be affectionately stared at by a cat. And yes, the cat is wondering if you’re all there. It’s what they do.

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