I had never really had any experience with goats until one evening in February, a couple of years ago. I was nestled in my easy chair when I received a phone call from my oldest son; it was about 9 in the evening. Don’t go to bet yet, he says; we are on our way from the sale barn in Mount Ayr with some goats. They had just decided to go up and just look things over and a friend was also there that had a trailer; and the next thing you know, he had bought some goats. Down to the barn I went to prepare a place for them. There hadn’t been any domesticated animals in there for a spell, I had to shimmy up a fence in the barn and replace an old lightbulb; and lo and behold, I had light. I picked up hopefully all the foreign objects that would harm them and found some hay and straw to bed them down with, so when they arrived, all the guys had to do was unload them and secure the doors until the morning light.
At 8 in the morning, I was out in the road in front of the house cleaning up some shelled corn, dumped by the renter when he had moved some cows. They could make do until the feed arrived later that day.
They were confined to the barn lot for quite a spell until some fences could be repaired or prepared for them. A fence has to be the same as hog tight to hold the little Houdinis. A llama I named Lenny arrived with the first group. He is their protector like a sheepdog is for sheep.
A while later, another group of nannies arrived; this time, a billy goat was among them. I named him Billy Bob, but he soon became known as Wild Thing, and he didn’t make our hearts sing as the popular song goes. After the nannies had their kids, we decided to confine Billy Bob so some new kids wouldn’t arrive at an untimely time. A pen was built eight feet tall and had 2x12’s at the top.On the day my son decided he had been in the pen long enough and was going to do him a favor and was going to stake him out by the barnyard so he could have some fresh greens. Wild Thing didn’t know what was going on when he entered the pen to put the halter on him. The goat made a leap and actually loosened the 2x12. Finally, the halter and chain were in place and he was dragged out of the pen; in an instant, the dragger was the draggee as Billy Bob was on the move to freedom. Before the rodeo had started, they had driven a post in the ground that was to be his stake and Billy headed south on a dead run; when he got to the end of the chain, it held. Everything was fine until the next time, when he headed north on a dead run, the chain did a loop to loop, and camp off the stake slicker than a whistle and down the road the wild thing went heading east. But what we had going for us was that he was a group animal. They don’t like to be by themselves, so he came back through two fences and was in the machine shed and hung up via the chain between the bailer and an old picnic table; he soon made mincemeat of it and put a couple of dents in the bailer. My son got him loose by hook and crook and he was off again through two more fences and in with the nannies. He wore that chain until they sold him that fall.
The fateful day arrived to take him to the sale. My son and his cousin got him in the barn and into the awaiting trailer. The chain had to be removed and the tussle was on. My son snubbed him down between the divider door and the trailer. A conversation similar to this followed: Cousin: "You’re going to kill him!" Son: "You can’t kill him." In the tussle, Wild Thing’s horn got caught in the divider gate and he passed out. Cousin: "You killed him!" My son removed the chain post hastily as he hit the floor; a split second later, the goat was on his feet. Son: "See, I told you, you couldn’t kill him."
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