And Six Ways in which Goats are Weird

1. They look forward to paste deworming. They suck on the wormer syringe like it is a lollipop from the drive-through banking window.

2. They have eight hooves. Two on each leg.

3. They have little fermentation vats in their stomachs, and burp lager-scented burps.

4. They relish the weeds and ignore the grasses. This is why the goats have not had their pasture privileges limited, whilst I have been barred from entry to the Regrowth Area.

5. They have no swatters on their tails. This is a tragedy.

6. They have no top incisors. Those are the teeth that one would need to use if one were to dine upon delicious bites of tender grasses, and this may be an explanation for why they don't prefer these bites. They like things that can be grasped with the molars and rended violently into the mouth, such as the leafy end of a spiny shrub-branch. It takes all kinds.

Our baby goatlings are very big now—at 13 days of age, in fact, they are now too big to nurse standing up!  FarmWife took them to the vet that they might have their horn buds cauterized, thereby neutralizing the Seventh Way in which Goats are Weird, and soon she will begin locking them up for 12 hours at a time that she might milk their mother in the mornings. She wants to drink the product of this lactation in her coffee, which is a bizarrely human desire but which Missy the goat will kindly indulge.

I, Fenway Bartholomule, will stick with the tender grasses and orchard grass hay, thank you, whilst of course cherishing the memory of my own horse mother's sweet white milk.

We have, by the way, a special new song coming up. Next time we're out for a sunny-day ride, FarmWife will sing it for you . . . it's all about my own dear mother, and the astonishment with which she must have greeted me, her strange mule child.

Love,
Fenway Bartholomule