Ah, goats… nature’s garbage disposal and self-appointed farm vandals.  Given the opportunity, they will eat everything in their path. Mostly, it’s stuff I don’t want them to eat, like the bucket handle, the sprayer on the hose, the feed scoop, a roll of paper towels.  You get the picture.  With their incredibly sharp teeth and a stomach capable of processing scrap iron from an entire battleship, almost nothing is off limits.  If it’s not nailed down, it’s fair game. And even if it IS nailed, glued, pinned, screwed or stapled, they’ll still somehow manage to get a hold of it.  They’re like ninjas – you don’t see them until it’s too late!  This morning, I caught them vandalizing their goat house.  They were both munching away on an entire shingle from the roof.  They finally gave up the shingle after I distracted them with some strawberries, but not before Vandal #1 proceeded, quite stealthily, to steal the belt from my coat and munch most of it down before I caught her.

Vandal #2, thinking I was distracted, tried to make off with the purloined shingle. However, I stopped her right in her tracks.  You see, fainting goats, when frightened, will stiffen up and topple over.  All I had to do was bang the tin pan that I had the strawberries in, against the fence post and PLOP…. over she went.  That gave me the few seconds I needed to leap on top of her and wrestle what was left of the shingle out of her mouth.  I stood up and she recovered and trotted off on her merry way, no doubt thinking, “What can I ruin tomorrow?”