Doug Fine: Author, Journalist, Adventurer, Goat-Herder

Which Method Do You Think The Universe Likes Better?

 

It occurred to me as I unloaded the unfathomably docile but sufficiently romantic buck (named Buck) back at his home ranch last week, both of us sneezing from juniper dust and suddenly surrounded by some kind of emu, that I might now have supervised both the best and the worst goat-breeding experience in the history of animal husbandry.

The reason the pairing of Buck and my second generation nanny goat Nico went so astonishingly smoothly (after the first two days, the process didn’t even trigger the P.T.S.D. symptoms I routinely experience as a result of the equally successful but far more traumatic breeding effort of two years ago), I realize, is that Buck and Nico were simply a good couple, for familiar-to-humans reasons, and not just because the temporarily-imported billy goat this time was neither the deranged Walt nor a test-tube.

In Catch-22, Joseph Heller refers to his Air Force characters’ surprisingly easy World War Two bombing missions as “milk runs.” How literally appropriate in the case of potentially nearly-as-horrific goat breeding. The milk run of a milk-producing effort that unfolded here on the Funky Butte Ranch over the past three weeks was a long time coming, and in fact wouldn’t have come about if it weren’t so hard to find good ranch help these days: my friend and fellow goat nut KC had her liquid nitrogen tank full of champion goat genes emptied unknowingly by a goofing-around employee who was no doubt air-miking in some kind of American Idol fantasy once he discovered the smoke machine that until that moment contained KC’s next several generations of goat DNA. He emptied the liquid nitrogen, in other words. The give-aways were the third degree burns on his legs. And the curled poster of Paula Abdul hastily tacked to the wall of the barn with horse dung.

That’s right. I was prepared to take the unusual (given my heavily organically-inclined life) step of artificially-inseminating my nanny goat this breeding season because the reign of terror of Walt, the father of the Funky Butte Ranch’s last generation goat kid, left such an indelible impact (and literal stink) hereabouts that I sometimes awake loudly with night sweats at the memory.

The Cliff’s Notes version of that earlier trauma is that someone had quite unsuccessfully tried to de-horn Walt sometime before a rancher neighbor of mine pawned him off on me for free, on the condition that he never be returned (I later took the same less than kind but necessary step with another neighboring goat nut — and that’s what you really have to understand to grasp the essence of what drove me to the steps described in this Dispatch: goat people are crazy, and it took me a long time to realize that I am one of them, not just a disinterested observer posing as a neophyte participant).

This botched de-horning both turned Walt, understandably perhaps, permanently belligerent, and left him with a scimitar of a right horn, which he used, daily, in a side-slashing motion against both me and every standing item in the goat corral, for the entire three weeks that he defiled the Funky Butte Ranch with his olfactorily-immoral presence.

To give an Executive Summary of the Cliff’s Notes version of this nightmare, the whole Walt experience can be encapsulated with the following sentence: you’d think, given his task, that the fellow would have been in a better mood.

But I guess it just goes to show, if it’s your job, anything can stop being fun. The resulting two cornucopian years of belly-bogglingly bountiful and delicious home-raised, organic milk, cheese, yogurt and ice cream, out of which I get not just most of my protein but terabytes of gloating, carbon-neutral lifestyle mileage in my journalism and live events, have only barely been worth it. That’s how nefarious Walt was.

You only need a billy goat on your ranch for 12 seconds (and believe me you don’t generally want one present for one second more than necessary, for smell reasons alone). But it’s a crucially-timed 12 seconds, so you actual require 20 days, to allow for the nanny goat’s fertility cycle. Within an hour, Walt had destroyed our goat corral enclosure and was at work on the double-layered steel fencing. Here’s Walt’s handiwork at the one-hour stage, and a near-miss moment between his horn and my head:

By this point I already had three contusions on my left thigh and one on each knee, despite insisting to Walt that “not only do I have no interest in your girlfriend, NONE, OW, I’d like you to go for it, man. And quickly.”

Which he did, once he had sent me running. All I was trying to do was feed him and his potential mate some hay. I remember thinking as I tossed the food and limp/scurried away, shouting “take a shower, dude,” as a parting shot, that I hope human males aren’t such comparatively bad representations of their gender, in either courtship behavior or smell.

The stinky beast slashed me every day for three weeks, failing to grasp that not only had my lifelong romantic inclinations been limited to females of my own species, but that I wanted him to have a successful date: “have a good time, fella. Do your job.” I went so far as to try to toot out a few Frank Sinatra ballads on my saxophone beside the corral for him and Natalie.

And so you can see (or would if you got a look at the scar on my knee) why, two years later, I found myself in the anomalous position of journeying 30 miles to a local vet for an instructional session in artificial insemination. KC, hearing the Walt saga and seeing the scar, had generously offered to provide some allegedly champion Y chromosome for me, with no knee and corral laceration necessary.

To prove the award-winning caliber of her line of liquid nitrogen-frozen semen, KC had earlier brought me to her office in town to do a little Googling with key words I was very glad not to be entering into my own machine. Search strings like “frozen goat semen shipping rates.”

What she turned up were mostly Idaho-based billy goat factories (who knew?), with blue ribbon winners in our Nubian breed preference featuring right wing names like Executive Privilege, Karl Rove and Free Market.

We ended up at one site called “Frozen Assets.” There, some years earlier, KC, who’s a talented and actually pretty famous scientific muralist in her non-goat life (meaning I got to see all these test tubes on a screen larger than some multiplexes), had ordered a billy goat named (I’m not kidding) Patriot. Or rather key parts of Patriot, shipped frozen via UPS. It was a freaky process, and not just because of all the blinking American Flags accompanying these names on the semen-selling sites (I wave the same flag, but consider other Americans than these goat namesakes to be the real Patriots), but because the actual, physical, stinking billy goat Patriot might be long dead, his genes living on in cryogenic eternity.

“So do I wait until Nico’s in heat, and just sort of, um, shoot this stuff in with a syringe?” I asked KC, while her employees at nearby workstations pretended not to listen. I was planning to breed Nico, Natalie’s daughter (via Walt). Nico is a goat it is impossible to express how thankful I am resembles her sweet mother in nearly every regard.

KC is one of those congenitally kindhearted human beings who derives pleasure from helping the ignorant evolve at least into the merely incompetent. So she just laughed and told me to meet her at the vet’s the following Thursday.

 

* * * * *

“Would you hand me that speculum?”

That was not only the first thing New Mexico veterinarian Dr. Ignatius Black asked me when I popped into his examination room, it was something no one had ever asked me before.

Because the morning goat milking had made me a few minutes late (the idea of “the local” anything, in the states I favor, like New Mexico and Alaska, might entail short plane flights in other parts of the country), I had entered a veterinary conversation underway between Dr. Black and KC amidst a decor of more surgical implements than I’d ever seen — it was like an exaggerated M*A*S*H set in there. If I was conscious enough to see this many forceps and syringes in an O.R. setting where staff were prepping for my own medical procedure, I might ask the anesthesiologist to just end it right then. Everything about the instruments being discussed triggered a sense of, “these are brought out when things are not right.”

The clinical atmosphere was just furthering my hesitancy about this laboratory method of goat-impregnation. Yes, Walt had been horrible. Still, for two years now, ever since his visit and Natalie’s giving birth to Nico, I’ve joked that my sweetheart and my goat were expecting at the same time, but that I was only responsible for the human pregnancy. This time, thanks to an Idaho ranch and thirty seconds with a syringe in the corral, I would be directly responsible for this next Funky Butte Ranch goat pregnancy, presuming Beginner’s Luck (a key factor in any of my ranching successes) carried the day. The things we go through for sustainability.

The whole process was throwing off my Organic Cowboy self-image. The only difference from Walt’s visit, I tried to tell myself there on the slippery linoleum of the vet’s exam room, was that I would be doing the few seconds of work instead of a manic depressive, scimitar-horned billy goat. Considered in evolutionary terms, this is not so huge a difference.

An obscene demo of artificial insemination was unfolding in front of me on the examination table. This snapped me back into the Now. The fifty-ish Dr. Black was knowledgeable, unsmiling and clinical, wore a pressed green scrub coat, and spoke like one of us country folk — with the accompanying truncated final consonants and, in a personal flair, ending nearly every sentence with “Nkay?” after the manner of the great South Park educator Mr. Mackey.

The discussion that morning, start to finish, would challenge the Motion Picture Rating Association to keep a documentary recording of it down to an R rating. I couldn’t recount any of it at lunch with a friend a few hours later, because when I tried, waitress avoided our table like we were contagious.

“Bet that wasn’t one of the Top 100 things you expected to talk about over lunch,” I told my friend when we had broached the issue of “caprine estrus discharge.”

I’ve since learned that the trick is to try not to map the goat sex analogies to humans. You just wouldn’t say of your own lover, for example, what I heard Dr. Black explaining to KC and me: “You palpate rectally, then penetrate the cervix, being careful not to draw blood, before nailing her with the syringe, Nkay?”

I realized in the clinical confines of the vet office, with its feline leukemia posters and mysterious whining dog soundtrack, that the whole issue of breeding my goat has always seemed presumptuous to me — I mean my total control over it happening at all. It doesn’t carry over to human behavior. Unless you both forget how to count to 28, you don’t decide when your partner is going to have a baby without consultation with said partner. Still, to consume milk (and oh, do we consume Funky Butte Ranch goat milk, cheese, yogurt, and most important of all, ice cream here: it’s our main source of protein) we need to always have a lactating nanny goat around. And it was time for the amazing Natalie, who has been giving nearly a gallon a day for getting on two years, to have a break.

Part of me felt a little bad that Nico wouldn’t be experiencing what passes for romantic love in the goat world. But that part of me, at the moment, amounted to maybe the tip of my pinky nail. For one thing, c’mon, goat romance? It’s about the aforementioned 12 seconds of actual contact. For another, the Walt experience was simply too horrible to repeat. And for a third, KC had made this artificial insemination business sound so simple and injury-free.

With all this ambivalence bouncing around in my head, the astonishingly graphic conversation I was having with people I hardly knew continued in the vet’s office. Example: “You want to get the a speculum (which I had handed to Dr. Black) past the cervix and into the uterus, Nkay?” Dr. Black was at the moment saying in the manner that some people might say, “Hit Control/Alt/Delete to reboot.” Yikes. “Use the lubricating jelly and sort of tip your goat up on her front legs 45 degrees, Nkay? Like this, Nkay?”

Clearly this man had never dealt with a goat — not one without heavy sedation. This all seemed so, well, unnatural. It was, I realized, all up to Nico. Would she be chill? A goat in heat, by definition is not “chill.” Hence the term “heat.”

That concern spurred me to speak up.

“Nkay, tip the goat? She weighs a hundred and ten pounds,” I noted.

Now, when I say Dr. Black was unsmiling, it doesn’t mean he was humorless. He responded to my query by turning to his wife (who had entered the examination room wearing a tennis suit and a decent application of make-up in search of the SUV keys), brandishing a two-foot long syringe, and saying, “You’re going to be the nanny here — hop on the table, Nkay?”

To which Mrs. Black responded with an “Unh-UH” reminiscent of Duane from What’s Happening.

In the end, it all turned out to be academic. Dr. Black informed us he was ready for a demonstration insemination “shot” into a plastic bag. KC turned to her squat, oval liquid nitrogen tank, which she referred to as R2-D2 and which had been sitting unnoticed in a corner of the room amidst all the other apparatus. While I put aside the question of “why would my successful artist of a neighbor even own a liquid nitrogen tank?”, KC started to tell me how to use a set of long, narrow extraction tongs to pull out the desired test tube, when she stopped mid-sentence and observed, “Hmm, this thing feels kind of light.”

“Where’s the smoke?” Dr. Black added, referring to the liquid nitrogen we all expected to see streaming out and turning the veterinary examination room into a Kenny G stage.

And just like that, my short-lived career in artificial insemination was over. Thanks to the liquid nitrogen theft/American Idol audition, I was allowed to creep back into my natural mindset about mammalian breeding taking place between, ya know, two actual living mammals. I wish I could meet the responsible delinquent ranch hand and thank him, or at least recommend him to Simon Cowell. Except for the hundreds of dollars he cost the angelic KC in lost goat DNA, I am just so glad that the punk had siphoned her liquid nitrogen. I felt an immense burden lifted, and that was before lifting Nico 45 degrees. I finally admitted to myself that I’d never really felt right about going the Neo-Con test tube route.

Still, another live billy goat on the Funky Butte Ranch for three weeks? Sure, actual mating is a concept that’s worked for several millennium (and don’t I know it?). Never has humanity successfully messed with the basics of nature. When the genius idiots try, we invariably get invasive species taking over entire farming communities, super-bugs defying Space Age antibiotics, and cloned bulls going nuts and maiming their owners. But the thought of another Walt nearly sent me back to the Frozen Assets Web site, Nkay?

I needn’t have worried. KC felt so bad about the nitrogen leak (imagine security at a nuclear power plant, if you’re inclined to support that method of energy production in its current iteration), that she practically pushed Buck on to me.

“He’s a sweetheart,” she insisted. “The most gentle goat I’ve ever known.”

I’d heard that before. The desperate rancher who’d pushed Walt on me had even used that same “sweetheart” moniker. Turned out he only attacked bearded neo-Rugged Individualist saxophone-playing writers.

But as a result of my respect for KC, I noticed a week later that I had one of those telling shopping lists for my rare-as-possible town trips — one of the kind I could show the IRS if they ever wanted proof that I am, as I claim, both a shepherd and an author. The list read, in part:

Recycled printer paper
Billy goat
Agave syrup

That pretty much sums up my life as much as anything a private investigator could turn up. It reveals my career inclinations, my ice cream addition (I sweeten with cactus juice these days), and the fact that, as a rule, I prefer to use natural methods, even when they entail bringing a billy goat back to the Funky Butte Ranch and thus interfering with my sleep and possibly my life for several weeks, rather than, say, a liquid nitrogen-cooled test tube, in order to impregnate a member of my livestock herd.

And so I woke up one gorgeous late winter morning to another career activity that no Western-trained guidance counselor has ever advised a student to pursue: goat wrangling. Into a truck, then, 40 miles later, into a corral.

“See ya in a couple of hours,” I sang to Nico in a plume of vegetable oil exhaust as I bumped out of the Ranch, “I’ll be back with your husband.”

Indeed, it was a bit of a Jeff Foxworthy-worthy moment when I canceled a greenhouse-investigation and beer-sampling visit with a neighbor (“I’ve got a billy goat in my truck bed, and he’s under 21”): “If your R.O.A.T. truck bed toolbox still has a goat poop sculpture on it three weeks after billy goat transport, you might be a Goat Crazy.”

Back on the Funky Butte Ranch that afternoon, I was still talking to goats. “Have fun,” I said to the appropriately named Buck, whom I couldn’t help noticing had spent his first three minutes at my home without doing anything more violent than nibbling at my finger. “Do your thing. And I’ll feed you.”

In fact, he was so respectful of my little Nico, that they dated for two weeks before taking it to the next level. It was nearly three days before they even started snuggling inside the corral during the cool late winter nights. That’s like three years in human time, and defied Nico’s fertility cycle, which we calculate more formally than we do our human one here at the Funky Butte Ranch. One night about a week into Buck’s visit, I went to check on the two putative lovebirds during the night, as there’d been coyotes singing up-canyon. I found them spooning in the covered roof part of the corral, Nico’s neck draped over Buck’s. That they are getting to know each other, that they are friends first, somehow means so much to me. That and not being repeatedly gored this breeding cycle.

Buck and Nico took a such a long while to warm to one another in that “like-like” way, in fact, that I thought I was going to have to break out my saxophone and start honking out the Sinatra tunes again. Probably a good thing I didn’t, though. My sax playing has been known to be the cure for a romantic crush, for several species. I did email KC, though, who told me not to worry about it: “She’ll like-like him in a couple of days and you’ll know it,” she assured me. “It’s all chemicals.”

But it wasn’t just about chemicals out in the goat pen. The two youngsters were clearly dating, but taking it slow. Maybe Buck’s last relationship had left him a little shell-shocked. Just because they smell magnitudes better than the males of their species, it’s wise not to underestimate either the psychological or the physical power of a nanny goat. Nico, I’m pretty sure, could take a coyote.

As I write, I’m still wondering, what’s the Big Picture lesson about billy goats here? Is it, “Don’t judge based on one badly-behaved, poorly-de-horned smelly apple?” I dunno, even Saint KC calls her billy goats “stinkers” as a gender. But Buck, if not fragrant, is far less offensive to the nose than Walt was. And toward me? He acted unfailingly grateful for every bowlful of grain and flake of hay that I brought him. More importantly to this proud herd leader, he clearly loved Nico, and though he was reluctant to leave the Funky Butte Ranch at the end of his 21-day stay here, he practically hopped in the truck bed on his own once I told him how it had to be. Nico, for her part, stared wistfully in the direction of the driveway for several days afterward. I have seen far, far less romantic and more to-the-point human courtships in rural settings. Their offspring are going to be Love Kids.

And ones in demand: I found out from the sputtering-in-disbelief reactions to my feed store and Craigslist postings that I am drastically under-charging for the line of super-milkers that I’m accidentally producing here on the Funky Butte Ranch. Suddenly I’m feeling a little, if irrationally, taken advantage of — livestock rip-offs, since Laban’s day, being the source of some of humanity’s first quarrels. My goats are getting such a reputation, in fact, that I’m considering launching a right wing Web site for their sale. Though I intend to keep to the “singers who sound goat-like” motif when I announce the second Funky Butte Ranch goat baby-naming contest in these Dispatches for the female we intend to keep should Nico bear one.

Meanwhile, I just returned Buck to KC along with a thank you gift of a milk jug made by a sculptor in my valley. I can hardly express what a relief it is to be back to the kind of breeding, if not the time for breeding, that nature has been favoring for past few billion years. Yes, it’s true. Fellow goat crazies out there will note that I am late. By the time Buck left we were into March. You’re generally supposed to breed your goats in the fall, for a springtime breeding after a five-month gestation. But I think a short email exchange with our friend, nurse practitioner and fellow goat nut Tricia summed up the explanation for that:

On Mon, Feb 22, 2010, at 7:15 AM, Tricia Macintosh wrote:

great! so we’ll see you in June for his wellness check-up. Wait. UR breeding now? kinda late in the season.

On Mon, Feb 22, 2010 at 9:46 AM, Doug Fine wrote:

Hi Tricia:

Yep — you know parenthood. You get around to things when you do.

-Doug

On Feb 22, 2010, at 11:11 AM, Tricia Macintosh wrote:

good luck to you. See y’all soon if u survive.

Indeed, full-time parenting, full-time writing, and the odd trip to Chile can interfere with a fellow’s full-time ranching, not to mention his REM cycles when there are coyotes around and he has to camp out with the goats. But then I’ve never met a goat who seemed to need a specific time of year in order to be interested in, ya know, the actions that lead to fertility. And I counted out Nico’s 20-day cycle particularly carefully, to ensure, in Dr. Black’s words, Buck “got” her. Usually I ignore what the goat books say about examining a nanny to see when she’s in heat. I know when a Funky Butte Ranch doe is ready because for a few days she actually appears to think about something else besides food and mischief.

And I’m sleeping well, which is a new sensation following a billy goat sojourn on the Funky Butte Ranch. To some degree, Buck’s gentlemanliness has dispatched the Walt demon from my subconscious mind. But it’s more than that: our goats are part of the family. Whether I want them to be or not. When they’re happy, I’m happy.

Goat husbandry is just about much, much more than the milking. Funky Butte Ranch daily routine is so wrapped up in caprine necessities that I notice nearly every day how I adapt key facets of my muscle memory to cope with my growing awareness of the goat mind. For example, my entire philosophy of “how long to allow before closing the Ranch gate behind me” has migrated dramatically from close to an hour when I moved here four years ago down to just under two seconds. Enough time, essentially, to squeeze myself and a wheelbarrow full of firewood through when the goats are out of the corral and in search of the rosebushes.

Goats, as prey animals and legendary survivors, are masters of timing, to the point that I intend to use their angles of motion to teach my children elements of soccer and Ultimate Frisbee offense. They’re capable of thinking across a planning timetable ranging from seconds to months. By this I mean that I’ve seen Natalie react in seconds after waiting for months for an opportunity — say, to get at my much-abused rosebushes or would-be grape trellis — watching my own timing and style all the while. She dashes when she thinks I’m not looking. And now she’s teaching her daughter the tricks of the trade, which Nico will no doubt impart to her own kid, currently (I hope) growing in her belly.

I have to be constantly on my guard about goats creeping up behind me. That’s why, carrying a ladder back to the barn from the orchard this morning, I waited to turn to Natalie and Nico until my hand was on the inner gate latch. Sure enough, they aborted their inner garden raid with a sort of “I have other things to do” half-body turn toward a nearby and also technically off-limits young oak.

The little Pans are capable of surprising subtlety of thought and amazing feats of quiet. “Nonchalant” is the demeanor that often comes to mind. The whole “just chewin’ our cud until you look away, at which time we’ll squeeze under the fence in a spot you hadn’t yet realized was compromised by skunks” act. It can be convincing until you know them.

Besides keeping me on my toes and occasionally lacerating me, goats also have no shortage of admirable personality traits. In addition to boundless love (both Natalie and Nico rest their heads on my shoulder during my morning meditation, confirming the theory that we humans have been interacting with goats as long as we have with dogs), I’m particularly fond of the fact that they don’t hold grudges. If I yank Natalie out of the rosebushes and rustle her down to the corral for Time Out, she’s smiling and chewing her cud within seconds, as if to say, “Nice work. You got me.”

Furthermore, goats are one of those species whose members don’t admit, in body language, to a mistake (compared to the often, if falsely, repentant dog). And even when they do get in to unauthorized areas such as the “fenced” inner acre of the Funky Butte Ranch, there are some notable benefits which partly offset the destruction of all landscaping and some motor vehicles’ trunk and roof integrity: after three years in symbiosis with goats, it’s still like a wildlife sighting for me to see two or three white goats, pure as snow and one horn away from unicorns, gently, circularly, above all peacefully munching my long-suffering roses. Plus, the goats, in their mischievousness, even provide home fire protection as tree trimmers — they clear my lower brush right to the eight-foot height suggested by firefighters in my extremely wildfire-prone valley.

And then there is the physical process of milking. The actual sitting there in the canyon, listening to the owl bass line against the treble lapping of the milk into the pail. This is the rhythm of my life. The cause of early departure from some parties. The excuse to get out of others. And, I’m acutely aware, an indescribable, blood pressure-reducing blessing. Some people’s soundtrack includes car alarms and subway brake screeches.

Each milking (morning and evening) takes about twenty minutes including feeding and watering but not including hoof-trimming or corral-cleaning days (and this is also when I gather the chicken and duck eggs). Natalie (soon Nico) hops on to the milker and pops her head right through the latch-in gap in exchange for the organic grain mix treat waiting on the other side that I refer to as Goat Crack. This happens (this has to happen) rain, hail, snow, flood, deep-freeze or (usually, thankfully) shine.

Twice-a-day milking is a sort of nursing — it’s almost like I am one of Natalie’s kids as much as she is one of mine (and readers of Farewell, My Subaru will know how much she is one of mine, from the scene where I had to nurse her back to health when she was a newborn). In fact, with a nursing human toddler on the scene, I frequently confuse the terms “nursing” and “milking” in conversation these days since I’m involved in so much of both. Like, I’ll say to my sweetheart of our son, “Did the little guy finishing milking?”

Milking so dominates the schedule here on the Funky Butte Ranch that some of my friends associate us, as a ranch family, more as goats than as humans. To whit, a certain exchange didn’t surprise me when we got a visit from an out-of-town family whose children knew us mostly from emails featuring smirking goats. This was when we were expecting our first human child (AKA future goat-milker). Over dinner (goat cheese salad), the visiting matriarch asked if we knew whether our forthcoming tot rancher was a boy or a girl.

I gave my usual, “one or the other, we think,” (with eyebrows raised) and then the friend’s 11-year-old daughter chimed in with, “Unless you have a goat!”

When considering the effect of the goat routine on life here, think Permanent Marker, physically and psychically. When it comes to the conventional grooming routines of modern life, for example, well, there really is no point of pre-excursion showering once you’ve cast your lot as One of Those Goat People. Indeed, the most remarkable aspect of your basic goat/human encounter is that it stays with you.

I remember one evening not too long ago when I finished the evening milking a bit early, because I had been invited to a party. I hadn’t been out in a long time (see above on full-time writing, parenting and ranching), so I really pulled out all the stops — I didn’t just shower, I conditioned. My shirt was fresh off the line and had a collar. And yet the moment I arrived at the party, the hostess Debbie hugged me and said, “Phew. Were you just meditating with the goats?”

I felt like Lady Macbeth — there is no washing off the evidence of your goat husbandry once you’re in this world. It’s like a felony conviction. Having work travel the next day, I gave thanks that Homeland Security doesn’t yet screen for rural redolence. And speaking of obeying laws, I have to go through a whole song and dance at the grocery store and bank counter when the “green, leafy material” forever stuck to my clothes flakes off on to the counter. “It’s alfalfa,” I assure the teller, wondering if she’s pressing the panic button with her foot.

But it’s truly all worth it. Barely. But it is. And I can sum up why in two words: “love” and “health.”

When your mischievous goat lays her head on your shoulder and meditates with you in the corral every morning, well, you grok the love part. And even more adorable than that, someone I love even far beyond my goats also loves said goats: one of my son’s first words was “mmbah.” Well-pronounced, too. He still kisses the goodnight every evening.

And then, of course, there’s health. I hesitate to gloat (the universe doesn’t like gloating, I find, and good health can always change), but I like to think that the superlative level of spring-in-the-step and good spirit enjoyed by all here on the Funky Butte Ranch has a lot to do with the fact that we eat tons of fresh, organic, zero carbon-mile local dairy products, rather than, say, Happy Meals.

I would thus be remiss not to end this Dispatch without praising the amazing Natalie one more time. Being such a newbie to goat husbandry (I won’t say “serfdom”), I didn’t realize how unusual her output has been, in both quantity and duration. Some nannies dry out after a year — Natalie is nearly at two. And her production has only increased over time. Where does she store it all? We’re talking about something like 420 gallons total given and drank or eaten so far, and I’m about to head out for this morning’s milking. This is a gift I will never forget.

–
Postscript: Pretty soon, I’m going to have a Funky Butte Ranch Goat Squad t-shirt design contest. I’m thinking that the only rule will be that the design must somewhere feature the Natalie photo on the right side of the top banner of this site wherein the mischievous Pan has my cowboy hat in her mouth. This is not a Photoshopped image, by the way. She frequently nabs it while we’re meditating in the corral in the morning. So I just wanted to get folks’ creative design juices flowing. There’ll be a small prize associated with the winning design. As well, of course, as immortal fame. Meanwhile, carbon-neutral or bust!

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