Sue Weaver - The backyard goat: an introductory guide to keeping productive pet goats

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Table of Contents

This work is dedicated to Karen Keb Acevedo, my sister in goats, and to Simone, Charlotte, and Albert, Pygmy goats extraordinaire.

INTRODUCTION

Why Goats?

Goats were humanitys first domesticated livestock; weve had ten thousand years to get things right. Todays goats provide tasty milk, delicious meat, attractive pelts, and two kinds of renewable fiber. They clear pasture for other livestock by grazing and destroying weeds and brush, they pull carts (goats are amazingly strong), and they pack along the tents and grub when folks go camping. It costs little to buy and maintain goats, and only a modest land plot is required to raise them. Goats are naturals for todays hobby farms.

The worlds goat population leapt from 281 million in 1950 to 768 million in 2003; more than 2.5 million of those goats dwell in the United States. The most lucrative livestock venture of the new millennium is raising meat goatsdemand by far exceeds supply, and it will for decades to come. Other profitable hobby farm goat ventures include marketing goats milk and value-added dairy products; mohair and the hides of Angora goats; cashmere; and meat, fiber, and dairy goat breeding stock.

Curious, intelligent, agile, and friendly, goats provide hours of entertainment for their keepers. Everyone who has goats loves them. Whether you want to turn a profit with goats or keep a few for fun, were here to show you how to get started.

CHAPTER ONE

Goats: A Primer

How long have goats been around? Where did the first ones come from? Are there many different kinds? What are they like? Who raises goats? Before getting into choosing, purchasing, housing, breeding, and other essential subjects, heres a brief look at goats through history and a glance at types, breeds, and traits.

FROM THE BEGINNING

Goats were domesticated around 8000 BC by the people of Ganj Dareh, a Neolithic village nestled in the Kermanshah Valley of the Zagros Mountains in the highlands of western Iran. According to archaeologists, goat meat had graced the human menu for more than forty thousand years prior to this. The earlier bones gathered from area caves, however, were discards from mature bucks (male goats), the favorites of hunters who needed to bag something big enough to feed a crowd. Toe bones recovered from Ganj Dareh middens are the remains of young bucks, the ones not needed for breeding purposes, and some aged does, females too old to have kids. The change tells us that people had begun keeping goats, rather than just hunting them.

After a one hundred to two hundredyear occupation, the good people of Ganj Dareh packed up their families and possessions, including their goats, and traveled south into the arid Irani lowlands. They resettled away from the wild goats natural range at a place called Ali Kosh. With a movable food supplygoats and two newly domesticated cereal grains, wheat and barleyhumans could abandon their long-time roles as hunter-gatherers and take up the mantle of nomadic herders and tillers of the soil. Archaeological excavations at Jericho unearthed mounds of domestic goat bones carbon-dated to 70006000 BC.

Early domestic goats served their human masters exceedingly well. They provided a portable and readily accessible milk and meat supply, fiber for tent covers and clothing, skins for leather, hair-on pelts for robes and rugs, and kids to sacrifice to the gods. Goats packed belongings on their backs and drew travois-type sledges. They were friendly and small, thus easily handled, and required minimal care. Best in arid, semitropical, and mountainous countries, goats survived on browse from trees, brush, and scrub, under conditions in which horses, sheep, or cattle would starve.

Goats spread east from the Fertile Crescent across continental Europe and thence to Great Britain. As elsewhere, goats there became the poor mans cow, thriving in mountain and moorland crofters fields and folds, from which they sometimes escaped. Their feral descendants still thrive in remote and isolated pockets along the west coast of Ireland, on Snowdonia in Wales, on Lundy Island and the Isle of Rum, in the Mull of Kintyre, Galloway, and Loch Lomond in Scotland.

During the 1500s, goats came to the Americas with Spanish conquistadors, settlers, and sailors. The Spaniards, like other seafarers of the day, carried aboard their sailing ships this tasty, animated meat supply. It was their custom to salt uninhabited islands with breeding stock, allowing them to harvest future meals on subsequent trips. Historians believe the Pilgrims carried goats on the Mayflowers 1620 maiden journey to the New World. Plymouth Colony certainly had them by 1627, when a resident praised the settlements goats because they yeeld commodities with their Flesh, their Milk, their Cheese, the Skinnes, and the Hayre. The Pilgrims considered goats milk a restorative medicine as well. In the coming centuries, goats accompanied settlers as they pushed westward across North America. By browsing as the party traveled, goats furnished their own eats while providing meat and milk on demand.

Domestic goats were a ready source of milk and meat for early settlers.

By the mid-nineteenth century, generic Spanish goats (also called scrub, brush, hill, briar, and woods goats) could be found in most southeastern states and throughout the Southwest and California. The year 1849 saw the arrival of North Americas first purebred goats: seven Angora does and two bucks imported to South Carolina. (Fleecebearing goats were commonplace in parts of Asia Minor as early as 600 BC.) One of North Americas few purely native breeds first made an appearance in the 1880s. An itinerant stranger named John Tinsley came to Marshall County, Tennessee, accompanied by four slightly peculiar goats. When they were startled, their muscles would seize, causing the animals to freeze and sometimes fall over. From these four goats, many believe, emerged the Myotonic goat, a heavy rump breedwith a tendency to topplepopular for meat production and ease of handling.

The 1904 Worlds Fair in St. Louis, Missouri, heralded a further turning point in goat history when it sponsored the first North American dairy goat show. The Missouri Historical Review noted, This first provision made at a Worlds Fair for a display of milch goats brought to the Exposition some choice and home bred specimens. At the same Worlds Fair, Hagenbecks Wild Animal Paradise imported two striking Schwartzwald Alpine does and displayed them in a lavish diorama depicting the Alps. This same year the United States formed its first goat registry, the American Milk Goat Record, now the American Dairy Goat Association (ADGA).

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