Doug Fine: Author, Journalist, Adventurer, Goat-Herder

To bring new visitors to these Dispatches up-to-date on the status of “Doug Being Outsmarted By Goats,” I could simply summarize the situation in one sentence: the goats are still winning.

In the three-and-a-half years since the mischievous Pans I got off Craigslist took over the Funky Butte Ranch, the caprine intellectual dominance is well-documented. Perhaps it’s because I named them after singers I like, but whose voices I think sound somewhat goat-like. Natalie (Merchant) and Melissa (Etheridge). But they seem to like their names. So I don’t think resentment figures in. We’re quite good friends. We hike and meditate together. We hug good-night.

It’s just that the goats seem to be in charge of which parts of the Funky Butte Ranch they can access, despite a one-acre fenced perimeter that is the only area officially off-limits (outside of their gated corral/bedroom, which requires a security carabiner on the door, since they long ago figured out how to open the latch). I entered goat husbandry under the assumption that I’d be the one in control of who goes where, and that this right was earned by the fact that I had the more developed cerebral cortex. I was smarter.

It’s increasingly seeming like I’m not.

For specifics, the newcomer can read Farewell, My Subaru and click on these relevant links to see why my rosebushes have been indefensible since my Crunchy Elmer Fudd-ish efforts to protect my tiny five-week-old goat kids from marauding coyotes when I first moved into a flooded, muddy Funky Butte Ranch. In short, goats, perhaps nature’s greatest survivors, saw within minutes of their arrival on the Ranch that amongst the vast forty-one acres of delicious wild forage, the bearded saxophone player who adopted them didn’t want them to eat these six flowering bushes near the Ranch house. Ergo, these must be the tastiest, healthiest food.

On the surface, such a realization is not a threat to my cerebral superiority. Lions at the zoo might “want” to eat me, but we humans have figured out a way to keep them fenced-in most of the time.

Now, though, as my second generation of caprine fiends (typo: I meant “friends”) grows up (same theme: Nico is named for the Velvet Underground singer, whom I think might actually be part goat), all of my increasingly elaborate attempts to fence, spike and even land mine the rosebushes not only don’t keep the smilingly determined beasts out: they don’t even phase them. I invariably catch my goats in the roses (and now my new grapes) munching away contently (and if you didn’t know better, you’d say innocently), just outside the Ranch house bedroom. The older generation is teaching the new one all its tricks, including Mattress Trampoline Maneuver (MTM), as documented in Farewell, My Subaru.

Fenced area? The phrase makes me, and any goat herder, laugh. My Pans always find a way in, and now they often can’t get their increasingly fat asses out, which leaves me to suffer the penalties intended for them in my defenses as I yard them out after much effort, clothes and limbs torn from barbed wire, and boot and ankles severely damaged from the Severe Tire Damage spikes I’ve set up around the rose bush perimeter. All to protect six flower bushes on forty-one acres of land. It kind of defeats the aesthetic purpose of a flower garden when it looks like Baghdad’s Green Zone.

But I thought that was old news. Ever since I passed along the genius/Houdini Melissa to a neighbor back in October in order to allow for the kids that Nico is, I hope, going to have this spring, I was operating on the uneasy assumption that the Melissa-free goat herd was suddenly, finally, fenced out of the rose area which now also houses my new, half-built wood-and-bamboo gazebo. This has walls designed to be snaked up next spring by my new, young grape vines, which, if all goes well, will provide summer shade and fall grapes, and who knows?, maybe a batch or two of wine.

But no, I found Natalie and Nico serenely feeding in this off-limits area upon returning from a hike today, and I have no idea how they accessed it. (Melissa had leapt a previously-unknown low fence spot on the day before she left the Ranch, but I fixed it.) They must have quietly snuck in while my back was turned after I briefly (I mean, for two minutes) opened the North Gate so I could wheelbarrow in some wood for the fire that night.

As a writer, I rationalize this constant outsmarting by an animal conventionally thought to be less-evolved than I am by remembering that human interactions with goats are metaphor and aphorism breeders. We humans have been interacting with goats for as long as we have with dogs. Same evolved intuitive understanding, most commonly expressed by canines in situations such as the one where your dog knows it’s a hike day even before you do. The principal difference being that goats have zero interest in pleasing you unless the proposed activity pleases them, too. It’s a fairly reasonable philosophy, when you think about it, and one that I’ve long believed the human Natalie Merchant employs before a performance. Or, in the case of the goats, I see it in Natalie’s hopping energetically on to the milk stand twice a day in exchange for a copious supply of goat crack (AKA organic grain mix).

Examples of these goat-inspired Universal Revelatory Truisms in my life range from “Accept those you love as they are” to “Don’t discipline while angry.” From “Don’t take things personally” to my favorite, if specific one, “The near-gallon of fresh, daily, local organic milk is worth nearly all the hassle, even if it came without the daily, humbling humor.”

Take this morning. It took three Funky Butte Ranch humans twenty minutes to get the two goats back out of the Primate Only perimeter. (And believe me the species segregation is only encoded because of the damage done when goats meet landscaping. That is, when one species’ natural art is another’s delicacy). Granted, my toddler son was being carried by my sweetheart during the round-up, but he played his role by singing exuberantly the whole time, keeping the vibe in what could have been a frustrating and slapstick attempted corralling unfailingly uplifted to the point of borderline hysterical (of course it struck him as funny to see his parents chasing around two unhurried and unworried goats).

This was the caprine mind at its best, and the human at its worst. They never exerted themselves. “Unflappable” is too weak a word. I nearly had to pull out the saxophone for the Pied Piper Effect. There are essentially only two ways to get a goat to listen to you. The first involves letting the goat know that you’re herd leader. But this is a fashion mistake and only a short-term solution. The second, longer-lasting option, as the Greeks recognized in designing their drunken reveling deity Pan in the form of a goat, is simply music.

Any music.

I play alto sax. Not well. But I can give my best effort at a Charlie Parker riff and invariably, if temporarily, the goats, mid-mischief (such as rose- or grape-eating) will freeze, transfixed, and stare at me unblinkingly as I back away and lead them down to Time Out in the Goat Corral. Which they know is a pretty sweet place with water, hay and shade anyway. They win no matter what. Let us thus take a moment to remember that the word “tragedy” derives from the Greek for “goat song.”

I was particularly emotionally…focused during this latest round of routine caprine carnage, because Nico’s putative breeding is this week. It’s going to be more Laboratory than Nature Special this time, for reasons that will resonate with anyone who remembers the name “Walt the Scimitar-Horned Billy Goat”. In general, you only want a billy goat on your property for the twelve seconds necessary, for smell reasons alone. But this guy, probably because of an unsuccessful de-horning earlier in life, dislikes, well, life. To my mind, you’d think he’d be in a better mood, given his job. But I guess it’s just yet more proof that anything can stop being fun, if it’s your job. What Walt’s two-week visit to the Funky Butte Ranch (those twelve seconds have to occur when your nanny goat is in heat) meant to me was the destruction of the goal corral and no less than four deep contusions to my arms and thighs. I still bolt awake with cold sweats from the experience.

So, this time, it’s going to be a test-tube doing the impregnating. Because my girlfriend and my goat were pregnant at the same time a few years back, I had to assert, repeatedly, over the course of two years, that I was only responsible for the human pregnancy. This time, I am going to be at least mechanically responsible for my goat’s conception. If all goes well.

I hope it does. I’m excited to see Nico’s offspring. We’re breeding her partly to give the amazing Natalie a break from lactating, and partly because Nico is a near-perfect goat. Before her assault on the rose and grape garden, she meditated with me in the corral, as she does every morning, nearly closing her eyelids over her horizontal slit pupils as she approached the Diamond chakra and then settling her head into my shoulder or lap as she breathed in a slow, centered manner that would impress a Hatha yogi.

Her infamous father is nearly absent in Nico’s demeanor, though she does have his beard. Nico gets Walt-like in behavior only occasionally (such as a sudden up-thrusting of the be-horned head during the odd hoof-trimming), but I find her a fun, self-assured, life-appreciating mind who is an integral part of the Ranch family and who I think will make a great milker. In color she’s milk-white like her mother, and has a very fluffy, almost bulky coat compared to the pure Nubian Natalie (Walt looked like he was perhaps an alpine/Gargoyle mix). And she’s been a great editor, too, since she was tiny, as in the photo at the bottom of this Dispatch.

An upcoming Dispatch will cover the results of Nico’s synthetic date. I have no idea what to expect: a neighboring goat expert, is, well, walking me through the process at the vet’s next week (she’s even providing the test tube full of virtual billy goat), and then I’ll come back, to, um, hopefully accomplish the task over the course of those twelve seconds I wish Walt had spent here.

Even with my still-palpable Walt-induced P.T.S.D., I have mixed feelings about going techno rather than organic in any process these days, but it’s just an experiment. And one that should explain to readers of these usually Back-to-the-Earth Dispatches just how deep and real the trauma I suffered from the angry horns of the insane billy goat last time was – Walt makes my female goats seem both well-behaved and divinely scented. The resulting two years of copious milk, yogurt, cheese and ice cream have only barely been worth it. Given how much I love dairy products, maybe more than anything that explains how traumatic Walt’s two weeks here were two years ago.

Indeed, I have to remember the goal here. It’s simple: to ensure that reliable dairy products keep me and my family alive and healthy even if grocery stores go away. So what if my rosebushes and grape vines are under current assault?

Or does that matter? There are two bottoms lines here, neither of them good, or maybe I should say “conventional,” from the Human vs. Goat Comparative Intelligence Study perspective: 1) I, the human, don’t really know how Natalie and Nico got in through the inner Ranch fencing today, and, 2) In the three years I’ve been entitled to put “shepherd” on my tax return under both “occupation” and “uninsured medical expenses,” I, the human, have never been able to consistently keep my goats out of my rosebushes.

Note, the next day: I have discovered where they got in. It was at a foot-long bent-over spot in the fence down by the chicken coop (and thankfully within hose discipline range). I caught them in the act this afternoon as I was egg-gathering for an omelette. Natalie, heretofore always the dainty, gentle one, was the instigator -– I see she has taken over from Melissa as head pain-in-the-ass, teaching her daughter all the tricks of the species, and she is as impressively athletic as her departed sister.

“Don’t discipline when angry,” I told myself, herding them back to the corral. Indeed, I should be impressed. The thought occurs to me that goats would make the best prison security consultants, the way banks and credit card companies know that convicted computer crackers make the best security consultants. The species motto can be, “We can get into anything, but we often can’t get our fat asses out.”

Given today’s discovery, my meditation mantra, probably for the next few weeks, is going to be, “A gallon of milk a day: it’s all worth it. A gallon a milk of day: it’s all worth it.” I just really want those grapes to survive the winter, so they can provide contemplative shade and borderline triple digit temperature relief while I wait for next year’s monsoon. At least I can say, at what is supposed to be the most boring time of year, that my life is anything but. Ensures I get my exercise, too, chasing goats.

I guess I should thank them: if life were too easy, I wouldn’t have so much to write about. And, ya know, by the time I need a break from this good life, my son will be old enough to milk the little devils. I’m beginning to see why folks used to have nineteen kids.

But I am not hiding from the raw data that continues to come in vis-à-vis “which species is smarter?” Hip educators these days are all over the idea that there are many different kinds of intelligences. But they usually mean “among third graders of the same species.” What does it say about the relative intelligence of goat and human co-ranch inhabitants when the goats without fail get where they want to go for their perceived maximum nutritional well-being (the goat thought clearly being, “If the bearded clumsy guy doesn’t want us there, that must be where the stash of the best food is”), while I, the human, with my species’ alleged several million additional years of evolution, can’t do a thing to stop them, over the course of three years of consciously trying (ya know, using that super advanced cerebral cortex and both of those opposable thumbs)?

Before answering that on its seeming face value, I think we need to look at the definition of well-being, as well as intelligence. Every night at the end of the evening milking, as the moon is rising over the Funky Butte, the owls are starting their night watch, and I’m thinking about getting the fire going before a dinner that almost certainly will include some kind of goat cheese in it, I find myself genuinely thanking the goats not just for the milk that provides so much of my physical well-being, but for the humor and mental challenges that are so much a part of my spiritual well-being. Not to mention the anecdotes that provide so much inspirational fodder and are thus a bona fide career aid.

Maybe in helping each other out so much, we’re both displaying impressive intelligence. It just feels like theirs is more intentional. Whereas mine just happens. All because I answered a Craigslist posting more than three years ago and told my tax preparer that I was now a writer/journalist/performer/shepherd. So I guess the question I’m left with is, “Is unintentional intelligence less intelligent?”

Or maybe this question is framed in an unnecessarily confrontational way. You come to realize, doing this flowing, lightly-squeezing milking motion, night after night, every phase of the moon, that you’re not in competition with your goats. You’re on the same team, the same goat herd or Primate Troop, or some new clan combination of the two that more accurately encompasses our multi-species Funky Butte Ranch family. It’s a symbiotic set-up that should have its own name. Because it’s helping me evolve as a Digital Age Organic Neo-Rugged Individualist. We’re a demographic. And I’m so thankful for it.

–Postscript: First I resisted cell phones. I didn’t need to be located all the time. Then I went on a book tour, where from the Interstate bookstores and speaking venues absolutely needed to know what kind of water I wanted on the podium and other crucial details of the professional literary life. Now I can often be found speaking to agents in New York while milking a goat in New Mexico. Fascinating things, these phones. I understand you can even make the ring sound like a favorite song and leave “messages” for people in a sort of “voice-mail.”

In any event, map the same progression of attitudes on to Facebook, and it’s come to this: I’ve allowed a fan page to be created. I’m told, by scores of people who sound as devoted as cultists, that I’d be remiss in bypassing this astoundingly miraculous and side effect-free way to grow millions of new fans. So this is where I’m supposed to invite you folks to become fans of the Facebook page, which has updates on live events and allows chats with other Funky Butte Ranch Goat Squad members (t-shirt design contest coming soon)! Meanwhile my Dispatches will continue as always from this blogging platform. Here’s the Facebook link and thanks as always for your support. (Click here to join Doug’s Facebook page.)

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