BEEN THINKIN’ ABOUT… JUST A BUNCH OF BULLY GOATS. The sun was warm that spring day in the barn yard and I was tending some 20 goats of all sizes, ages and temperaments. I loved the barn. I loved the goats and would much rather be out in the barn wallowing around with whatever baby critters we happened to have — or wandering in the wilds of the forest — than doing my homework.
Goats get a bum rap for being ornery (they are) and for eating everything including tin cans (they don’t). All of my goats over some two decades proved quite picky about their nutritional needs, often turning up their noses at the wrong kind of hay or even the wrong kind of bagel (when we had a plethora of processed grains but that is another story entirely). But goats don’t have fingers which means they test textures with their lips and tongues, leading the uninitiated (read, ignorant) to wrongly conclude that goats are indeed trying to eat gloves or coats or fingers or — traditionally — tin cans.
Insider note: traditional food cans have paper wrappers and paper is made of wood pulp and wood pulp IS something goats eat. More than one town kid at the county fair has been fooled into thinking goats eat tin when the cloven-hoof ruminants were merely nibbling off tasty paper. I learned the paper-as-food lesson the hard way when one summer day I took one of my story books out to the barn to read to my goat friends. Spoiler alert: they were far more interested in the pages for their taste. But do they eat metal? Absolutely not.
In Matthew 25 there’s a parable about goats and sheep being separated. The goats represent “those who are hardhearted” who will be “sent to damnation and sit on the left.” Couple that with goats’ intelligence and propensity for getting into trouble (often from sheer boredom), and a lot of people just don’t like goats. I’d best not even get started on the generally overwhelming lustiness of the billies. Suffice it to say that although my very Christian home school curriculum did not cover sex education, I got an effective working education just keeping billies apart from nannies (and counting the months of gestation on the calendar which said efforts were unsuccessful).
But the truth is some of my best friends have been goats, from the motherly Maggie to the affectionate and empathic Abe to the kindhearted and always-escaping Scout. Don’t worry. Scout always put herself back into her pen before nightfall. However, if there was one inescapable problem with so many goats in the same barn, it was this — goats fight over food.
More specifically, they form hierarchies quickly, with certain goats controlling the barnyard, controlling who may and may not eat and when. As I was the one doling out the shelled corn, I had a front-row seat to the bullying. As the victimized bleats of the oppressed reached my ears yet again, I decided I would finally intervene. I worked that whole warm spring afternoon, preparing an adjoining pen and then handpicking the oppressed of the goat herd and packing them to or cajoling them into their new space. When I was done, every sad little oppressed goat has been herded together where they could now enjoy goat utopia. I went to bed a happy boy that night.
Next morning, I hurried out to appreciate my social-engineering handiwork, pouring out corn in both pens. To my dismay, the newly founded goat utopia I had created lasted not even 12 hours. The bullied goats had created a completely new hierarchy and were knocking their less powerful barnyard friends out the way with enthusiasm. In the absence of the old bullies, a new set of bullies had formed. I yelled at them, trying to make them understand the hypocrisy of their actions. They ignored me. Disgusted, I opened the gate and put all the goats together again.
Goats are smart and I never forgot the lesson. The real problem with goats isn’t that they’re ornery. It’s that they are too human. I am oft-dismayed that my contemporaries never got to learn such barnyard lessons so well. And I have often seen the same morality play return again and again. Our hearts are stolen by the bullied, the victims, the oppressed, but goats will be goats, and humans will be humans. Left to our own devices, the most heartily oppressed can turn from bullied to bully, the victimized sometimes the most sadistic. “But you know what being beat up feels like,” I want to yell, yet again pleading, “You are better than this.” But they are not and we are not. Not without awareness, not without some need deep need to transcend to a better self, not without real direction and consequences. Without such, we’re really all just a bunch of bully goats.
— Joshua Heston, editor-in-chief, StateoftheOzarks
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