I came hurtling around the laundry door about to launch into
a fascinating story about who I had just bumped into down town when I realised
Craig was on the phone.
“I just don’t think so”.
Silence
“Uh um, yes I understand”
Silence
Always the eternal sticky beak I was ease dropping, his tone
was much more serious than usual, he was really concentrating and I could not
figure out who he was talking to or what they were discussing. After a long pause he says “Ok then, we will
see how it goes, bring her out this afternoon”.
After he hangs up the phone my very practical and very kind
husband turned to me and said “Fr Scott is bringing out the goat this
afternoon. She has destroyed their
backyard and he isn’t allowed to keep her”.
Without taking a breath he continued “Council have already been around
to say it is prohibited to keep a goat in town.
He has nowhere else to take her, we will just put a pen down in the
paddock, and it will be fine. Templeton
and the goat might even become friends.”
I gently reminded him “I thought you told me, when we saw
the very cute baby goat at the Bazaar, in no uncertain terms Don’t Take The
Goat, it will destroy everything”.
“Yeah I know” he said, turning to head outside, he mumbled
on his way past “It will be fine, I will make sure she can’t get out of her
pen”. The gauze door closed and he was off
to plan what to do with the goat. I know he didn’t really want the goat either,
but when it comes to animals he is a softy, he befriends them, talks to them
and they are extremely loyal to him in return.
After lunch we headed to the paddock to goat proof the pen
we had been using for our poddy calf. It
was hot, hard work but we were proud of it, it looked like a fort, completely
impenetrable. Not long after we had
finished a young, enthusiastic, kind of ugly goat arrived. She was not a cute baby goat anymore, with
big floppy ears but rather she had long skinny legs, a fat tummy, crazy eyes on
either side of her head and a kind of speckled black, grey shaggy coat and two
stumpy little horns starting to grow out of her head.
Not to be deterred we introduced her to the pen and
Templeton, the poddy calf, who she was suppose to become friends with. After trying to head butt the calf repeatedly
with her tiny little horns she went exploring, and right there in front of us
she jumped up and over the pen we had worked so hard to build! Here began a long and repetitive pattern of
Goatie escaping from the pen, Craig adding more wire and mesh to try and keep
her in and everybody shouting ‘That bloody goat’.
Every time she escaped she would head straight up to the
house. She had spent the first few
months of her life in a residential backyard, with two other dogs, four
children and some chickens, she was absolutely domesticated and thought she belonged up at the ‘main
house’ and was an integral member of the family. We had a very different idea, we wanted to
fatten her up quickly and eat her as soon as possible.
We did try to be loving custodians of the goat, we would go
down early in the morning and cut new tree limbs for her to munch on, we would let
her out so she could run around the paddock and stretch her legs. Each time she would do a couple of crazy
tricks, running really fast, then jumping up in the air ducking and weaving her
head. We thought it was hilarious, we
would start to relax and enjoy the fun but next minute she would do a mad dash
back towards the house and eat the new growth of all newly planted jacarandas,
rip the newly laid turf out at the roots, jump on the beautiful timber outdoor
setting and cause mayhem and destruction.
We would then chase after her shouting “That bloody goat”.
After a week or two we would forget these incidents and we
would let Goatie out again. On one
occasion we thought it would be brilliant to include Goatie in one of Sage’s
eKindy web lessons. We went and dragged big
branches onto the deck, laid down some blue fabric for the creek, got big rocks,
it looked beautiful, and then we added Goatie.
Well only about 30 seconds into the web lesson with the Brisbane based
kindy teacher Goatie jumped onto the table and head butted the computer,
scaring the life out of the teacher, Sage cried because Goatie was ruining
everything and I tried, in vein, to regather and make the session work. Eventually we gave up, I mumbled “That bloody
goat” under my breath and dragged her back to the pen. Goatie thought the
venture had been a great success, she couldn’t understand why everybody else
wasn’t happy.
So finally, Craig had perfected the pen and Goatie was
securely restrained then a friend who is a Vet popped in to visit, she
suggested the goat probably had worms and would need to be wormed and have her
pen relocated to a different part of the paddock. Well this did lead to a number of expletives
being expressed but we did it, we moved the 10 very heavy steel panels and all
the wire and mesh down under a beautiful shady tree. It took weeks to secure it because Goatie got
out every time we turned our backs. On
New Year’s Eve we had all just gone to bed at about 1am, we had friends camping
out on the deck, at about 3am we heard a loud shout of “The bloody goat is
trying to eat our tent”. By the light of
the full moon only 3 hours into the new year I could see her out there chomping
on the leaves of our house yard trees, the pen was too far away so I chained
her up in the shed, next to a huge tuft of grass, where she ‘bleated’ all
morning until the sun came up. So on New
Year’s morning we all rose from our beds saying ‘that bloody goat’.
Eventually we gave in to Goatie’s demands, we built a pen in
our backyard so she could see us and talk to us all the time. This made her so happy, plus we could feed
her extra food much more regularly so she got too fat to escape from her
pen. All was good, but we did want to
reclaim the back part of our yard, so the time came to ring the abattoir and
enquire and the humane slaughter of the goat.
It was a Wednesday afternoon, the girls and I were out and
Craig came home from work to take her to the abattoir. It was such a difficult occasion, we thought we
hated that goat but we were sad. She had
worked her way into our hearts and we had developed a relationship with her,
that was not supposed to happen. It was
not made any easier when the slaughterer said to Craig “Is this your pet mate?”
as Goatie looked up at Craig and bleated pleadingly to be taken home again.
On Friday 18th October Goatie was lovingly
marinated using a traditional Ugandan recipe and she was BBQed on Saturday, when 45 of us gathered in
the name of fellowship and fun to taste the
bloody goat and she was delicious.
It was an afternoon filled with laughter, singing, love and joy, it was
a memorable event that people will talk about for years to come. In the end Goatie bought us all a huge amount
of joy and we are so eternally grateful that we did take the goat.
At the end of the feast Fr Scott said "Today at the Farmer's Markets I saw turkey chicks ... anybody keen"!!