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. Read more…