I'm Milking These Goats

Uh, milking these goat photos, should say, for all they're worth, anyway.

Here's another shot, very similar to another one of the same goat.



But, I HAVE milked a goat. We had goats when I was growing up; oh, not a lot of 'em, but my dad (as he was prone to do) did some trading for a few of them. I think he had some sort of vision of being a goat rancher, or maybe he was just drunk as a skunk when he traded for them. We did have a nanny and I milked her for my dad's now-and-then glass of raw goat milk. Gag. My show pig and the cats and dogs we always had got the most of it until the nanny had a kid.

I remember it well; I had just turned 16, got my driver's license and a beat up '62 Pontiac Tempest (similar to a Corvair) for fifty bucks. Me 'n Dad had worked on that thing for quite a while, overhauling the tranny and fixin' some cancer spots on it and painting it back to the surprisingly lovely original maroon color. All-in-all, it was a pretty good job, considerin' it had all been done in the garage.

Then we got the goats.

Goats, as you may or may not know, are climbers, and they shunned all of our other vehicles in order to perch on top of my new/used car. Of course, the paint job went to hell under their cloven hoofs, and no matter what I did to them -- siccin' the dog on 'em, runnin' out and yellin' at them or even pepperin' 'em with my trusty childhood Daisy BB gun did the trick and kept them off the top of my precious little car.

The little female goats were pretty sweet, other than the fact that they enjoyed using my Pontiac as a substitute for a rocky craig. The billy, though...he was a piece of work. I do not know why male goats do this, but he was like all the others I've seen or heard about, and liked to pee on his whiskers and consequently stunk to high heaven. It's supposed to be an attraction to female goats, but I'm not for sure that it'd work on human girls.

I got the pressure to reach MY chin, but I can't grow a beard anyway, so.....

That goat sure tasted good though, later that summer, barbequed for several hours over hot coals in a pit I gladly helped dig in an empty spot out in the garden. This came about when, after Dad had bought a nice, but used Chrysler, the goats found it to be a better vantage point than my car. The female goats escaped the billy's fate, being traded to some Mexican for an old Dodge pickup. Come to think of it, they probably wound up in tamales anyway.

Bet they were good.

(this is basically the text of an email I sent to my friend Barb after she sent me some photos of her own new goats. I had to clean it up to post it here.)