My Goats (Maggie and Honey)

I have two African pygmy goats. Their names are Magnolia Blossom ("Maggie") and Honeysuckle ("Honey"), which I thought sounded like good names for Georgia goats.

I bought them because I wanted pygmy or dwarf goats, mostly because of the novelty.

I'd heard that goats make good pets, although pet goats were rare when I was a kid on the farm in Indiana. But goats seem to be more of a Southern thing. They're used as food animals (especially for barbecue), sometimes as dairy animals, for weed and brush control, and occasionally as pets.

Unbeknownst to me, African pygmy goats are perennially young, or at least they act that way. The head-butting, running, pronging, spinning in midair, running and jumping sideways. Plus the more typical goat behavior: climbing and jumping on anything accessible. On my car, for example. They ruined the paint on my car, and on my truck. They've scratched the windshields by jumping or running from hood to roof and back to hood. They've eaten all my shrubbery, one student's homework, and a set of advertising slicks that were to have been submitted along with the final manuscript to a journal. But I don't really care. I find it all rather amusing; they act so silly.

One thing I find amusing -- that is, ha-ha funny as well as philosophically intriguing -- is their occupying "people space." Actually, everyone seems to be amused when atypical pets occupy human space. It's okay (socially acceptable, in our culture) to have cats and dogs in the house, but not "livestock" or "wild animals." My little goats hate getting wet so when they're not confined to their pen but are allowed to run in what-other-people-would-consider my yard and it begins raining, they race to the front porch for cover. Maggie usually jumps in the porch swing, and Honey gets in the glider and looks through the living room window (often it appears that she's watching television through the window). If the rain continues for a long time, I put hay and a bucket of water on the porch for them. They've slept many a night on the porch because of rain. Occasionally one of them gets into the house. They've learned that the front door is not always tightly shut and sometimes if they butt the door it will open. So, every once in awhile I'll have a goat meandering through the living room into the kitchen. I think it's funny; many people are appalled at such trespassing. But I see the arbitrariness of the way we humans define space, especially as to who "owns" it.

They're immensely entertaining. They can always make me laugh.