Sadly, There Is Always A Pecking Order

      The photo above shows a very young kid goat.  The young goat in this story was older and bigger.

      Back in the 1980’s when I started to develop my herd of Angora goats, I was shocked when I first began to notice that they were violently butting each other.  I naively expected that the seemingly gentle creatures would continue on as a happy herd.  I had forgotten that, like all animals that live together, they had to establish a pecking order, figuring out who would boss over who. 

        The goats would sometimes brutally butt each other with their horns, which seemed very cruel, but it was part of a deeply established instinct in them.   They had to create a hierarchy, and sometimes there were individuals that were ostracized. 

    All animals can be cruel, and my Angora goats were no exception.  In my herd there was a young goat that was constantly being picked on by the rest of the herd.  They must have identified some weakness or flaw in the young goat that led them to pick on it. 

            To prevent the victimization from happening at night when they were in the barn, I put the picked-on goat in a separate pen by itself under the stairs.   I really had no control of what happened during the day when the whole herd was outside in the paddock.

    The goat was a little devil, really independent from the herd.  In the evening when I opened the barn door, the young goat always waited until last, before it ventured back into the barn where the other goats were.

    Its mother was always loyal to him, and waited for him to come out from the barn in the morning.  I had noticed that in the morning when I opened the big barn doors to let the goats outside, the rest of the herd would rush to the crates of hay I had put out.   There they bumped and butted each other for access to the hay.   Instead, the young goat would rush to the bucket of water and rapidly  drink, before the rest of the goats came over to drink.  

            One afternoon when I came home from work, I discovered the lifeless body of the young goat laying in the snow.  It had been butted-over and once down, couldn’t get back up.  It may have been wounded by the butting,   Eventually it quit breathing and died.  The previous week a similar thing had happened, but I had found it in time.

    I was very saddened by the death of the small goat.  It had never been accepted by the herd, and its whole short life had been a struggle.

    

View my paintings at:  davidmarchant2.ca