More Farm Girl News

The Lawlesses are kindly letting me come over and follow them around during their morning chores, by which I mean experiment on their animals rather than kill my own. In honor of them, I shall enumerate:

Things Everybody Needs To Know About Goats:

1. Their horns are super-efficient handles. Don't think you're hurting them when you wrench their heads around to get them to go where you want; they secretly like it.

2. Another note about their horns: they get stuck on things. Like, in the middle of a fence. Goats are smart enough to get their heads through the fence one way, but not smart enough to get them through the other way. It works like barbs on an arrow, except it baas.

3. Every morning you have to clean the poop out of their food troughs. 'Nuff said. These are not particularly smart animals.

4. They're fast little boogers.

5. When you chase a baby goat and manage to catch it and it screams bloody murder for its mama, don't worry. It'll quiet down after you hold it for a while, and the next time it won't scream for such a long time, and so on until it doesn't mind being caught.

6. On a related topic, the goats always sound a lot more pathetic than they actually are. Don't let a goat make you think it's lost and sad and miserable and needs extra food; it's a lie.

7. When you're throwing hay down from the top of the hay stack into their feeders and you miss and hit a goat on the head with a fourth of a bale of hay, it probably won't even notice.

8. If you shock it with a cattle prod, however, it will notice. Then it will make a funny startled "maa-ap" sound and leap over the rest of the goats, and probably get stuck crowd-surfing, if you happen to shock it when they're all crowded around trying to stick their noses in the bucket of grain that you're taking to their trough.