Story time - My dad asked the local school which had a goat if he can borrow it for a weekend. It was to tame his backyard. As the backyard was enclosed with no chance of the goat escaping, we left it by itself. The goat was be extremely hungry and ate everything insight including the roots, leaves and bark. By Monday, the backyard is barren and took months recover.
In German, there’s an old phrase: “Appointing the goat as gardener”. You use it when somebody is being made responsible for task for which he is not just incompetent, but where he will actually cause damage - for instance because he has ulterior motives.
Fantastic. I think most of the "equivalents" miss a lot of the nuance.
We don't expect the fox to be any good at guarding the chickens, but the goat could plausibly start out as a good gardener ("mowing" the grass and eating the weeds). But then through enthusiasm and love of the work end up ruining the garden...
> is not just incompetent, but where he will actually cause damage - for instance because he has ulterior motives.
That made me think it was more. And anyway, as much as the fox does with chickens, the goat knows it will set about to kill and eat plants. There's no real reason to call the fox knowingly malicious and the goat not.
Goats are anything but placid. They’re tricksters and bullies. They won’t hesitate to charge you from behind and knock you down. They will also happily chew on people’s clothing and long hair. Goats are jerks! They’re also just really funny and lovable.
Interesting read :-) With cats, apparently one can spray water on them when they're at the border to ones garden, and eventually, also when you aren't there, they still think they'll get water on themselves if they go outside the garden. So they don't -- a border has been created in their mind.
I wonder if that works with goats, instead of the gate? I guess not.
Maybe also doesn't work with smarter cats, hmm.
(I suppose it's not your boy in the video?)
> the stripped area can be bridged with thin shoots embedded into the bark on each end of the open wound
Didn't know, I was surprised to read that it actually worked :-)
I don't know if it would work on goats., They aren't fond of being rained on though, so maybe? They are really motivated however, and smart enough to figure it out.
The bridge grafting worked great! The tree never lost any leaves or flowers, now has plums on it. For what it's worth, the shoots I spliced are now brown on the outside like the regular bark.
My town stopped its annual “goats clear the park” setup because one goat would consistently escape and wreak havoc on traffic. Pretty solid enclosure, too
You'd think so... but yeah, they have their own sort of smarts. Mine are very adept at reaching or finding tasty plants. One was less bright about plants on the other side of a fence that her horns fit through, one way. I had to rescue her about eight times, until the horns were long enough to not go through the fence wire.
our state DOT has rented goats to clean the sides of roads along highways in some rural areas, especially when there are large amount of noxious weeds. The person they hire strings up a bunch of short fiberglass poles for a mile or two along the highway with some wires, puts out some water, and then lets the goats in. Comes back and picks them up a couple of days later, and moves them to the other side.
My sister has a small farm and in addition to cows and horses she also has rabbits. Every spring, parents show up to buy a rabbit to have at home. When the deal is done my sister takes the parents aside and tell them that if they plan or feel by the end of the summer that they want to let the rabbit loose, they can return it for free.
What she does not tell is that our brother-in-law is a chef and happily makes rabbit stew of the returned rabbits. If there was ever a win-win situation, this is it.
> If there was ever a win-win situation, this is it.
Say what? She lies via omission to the parents, forcing them to make an uninformed choice.
Instead of letting a rabbit loose in the wild, they might have sought another home for it, because they didn't want it to die. Your sister's lies mislead them into thinking they can safely return the rabbit.
They can, in fact, safely return the rabbit to the stew pot.
They're food. Rabbits. People eat them.
It's not better for the rabbit to be turned loose to be mauled to death by a housecat or eaten by a coyote. A shelter is going to euthanize, wasting good meat.
That's not the point. I have literally nothing against eating rabbits - they are delicious in fact.
I do hover, object to lying. Like OP said - they(everyone in fact) have the right to make an informed choice. By omitting this information, people who are returning a rabbit aren't making an informed choice. It's a trick, a ruse, if money was involved I'd call it a fraud.
The situation implies that the person selling the rabbits as pets would attempt to rehome them or care for them as pets.
There's a difference between being technically correct, and being moral. While the language used is technically correct for the situation, omitting the information about where the rabbits end up is immoral.
Clearly OP understands that if the whole truth was told, they wouldn't be getting a free source of rabbit meat...
Is it dishonest to buy a rabbit and not mention that you're planning to eat/breed/keep it as a pet?
No of course not, it's none of the seller's business. If they say "hey we're vegan please don't eat our rabbits" that's a different matter, it would be at the very least polite to respect those wishes.
Why on Earth would returning a rabbit to a farm where they eat them be any different? In this case the possibility is perfectly clear.
In this case, the parties are close relatives, so I would argue that their threshold of duty to disclose such facts is somewhat higher than in case of complete strangers.
I think the expectation is that since they bought the rabbit there and the rabbit was happily living there, when they return it, they expect it to still live. They think they are returning the rabbit to its "natural" environment and will happily live on the farm.
So there is no legal duty or obligation, but morally, the expectation on both parties are definitely not the same. Otherwise they would tell them that they would cook them when they return them. The fact they are hiding this information shows that expectations are not aligned.
what matters is not what we think. What matters is what the girl recovering the rabbits thinks. If she thinks that if she told the truth the rabbits wouldn't be returned to her, then by not saying anything, she is lying by omission.
The part which seems relevant is if the parents (or a random person) had the information that the rabbit would be made into stew, then that would likely change their decision to return the rabbit.
I was in Northern Vietnam in 2019, happily riding my rental scooter around.
I ride right past a dog on a rotisserie.
I stopped to talk to the guy and he showed me his sign that said Dog Meat. After learning the words for dog meat in Vietnamese, I saw the signs everywhere.
I've had dogs as pets for decades. I don't see why people cant eat them if they want to. I wouldn't eat my dog because of emotional attachments, but that doesn't mean that others who don't have emotional ties cant eat them.
Letting them free will likely get them eaten anyway, probably less humanly since they’ll still be alive while they are eaten. Or run over. These are domesticated rabbits, not wild ones.
What the parent post means is that the owners might not have let the rabbit free bit would find an other alternative, like keeping the rabbit anyway because they love it, giving the rabbit to a friend etc.
But now they think their is this great alternative of giving the rabbit back but unknowingly killing it.
I’ve had several friends have rabbits in my lifetime. They all t eventually let them go instead of finding a new home. Each time I looked at them in horror while I imagined the lucky hawk having dinner.
Most people think rabbits are “natural” when they may actually be invasive. So they let them go. Finding a new home is the last thing on every one of these owners mind.
I could never imagine doing this to an animal I care about. This is sociopathic behaviour. Unless they believe the rabbit will survive, in which it's just wildly ignorant. And therefore irresponsible, because a rabbit owner should have a rough understanding of what a rabbit is and how they work.
There was a case here in Norway a few years back. A litter of dead kittens was found in the woods, wrapped in several layers of plastic bags. Inner layers had scratches proving the kittens were alive and not stillborn.
Hongkong has a _modest_ social problem related to freeing unwanted pets into the wild. There are numerous billboards and buses adverts warning people not to do it.
On the other hand, there is very real urban legend of a salt water crocodile that was captured in early 2000s in the Hongkong wild. It was hunted for months. Authorities have no idea if was a release, or travelled from nearby (more tropical) region. Read more about Pui Pui on Wiki: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pui_Pui_(crocodile) She is even on show at the Hongkong Wetland Park. But if you want to see salties in the wild without too much effort or stress, you can do that in Singapore at a wetland reserve near Kranji.
It's not contradictory in the slightest, the odds of a domesticated and domestic rabbit surviving predation are effectively nil.
The odds that it manages a litter first are higher, especially if it escapes pregnant, which rabbits generally are if they're able to be. Those pups are feral, not domestic, and have moderately better odds. Given enough generations, the domesticated neoteny is selected out by predation and now you have an invasive population of feral rabbits which can survive in the wild.
My experience is that you don't let a rabbit go... you just stop trying to track the little lagomorph down after it chews through or digs under the fence for the third time.
Rabbits are good as prey, great as pests, bad as pets.
You cannot release them into the wild, just like you can’t release penguins from the zoo into the wild. We spend most of our adult life teaching our children how to survive. Most people don’t teach their pets how to survive.
No offense, but your question makes no sense in the scope we are dealing with. But fwiw, most people released from prison don’t do so well with reintegration. Some don’t survive, some end up going back, and very few thrive.
Doesn't this produce a selection effect against cute rabbits? Parents are more likely to choose cute rabbits, those rabbits become pets, they either get returned and eaten or kept. So non-cute rabbits tend to live longer on the farm, and as such have more offspring and get selected for, and eventually the farm will be covered in ugly rabbits and your sister will not have any clients anymore.
What kind of people adopt a pet, and then release it into the wild? People doing this with cats is one of the reasons stray cats are such a big problem in many places. People dumping cat litters in the woods and what not. And rabbits can be an ecological menace too if allowed to multiply, which they do like rabbits.
I'm not talking about cat litter I'm talking about litters of kittens. Who gives a fuck about litter?
Unless you're talking about litter as in garbage.
But if you think dumping helpless animals under your care to fend for themselves is morally equivalent to littering, I'm not even sure what to say to that. It's not even in the same ballpark.
Since you asked nicely: downvoted for using a specific type of language.
It’s the first part in the HN guidelines for comments:
“Be kind. Don't be snarky. Have curious conversation; don't cross-examine. Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community.”
Thank you. Yeah, I kind of misunderstood GGP as a deliberate misinterpretation of my usage of the countable noun "litter". And it ticked me off. Having grown up on 4chan and IRC, I'm often a bit surprised by what's considered snark on HN vs other parts of the internet. I'll try to adjust my weights in future.
I think that animal abuse is not the same thing as littering but that the type of people who litter are also the same type on irresponsible people who will think that leaving a rabbit to fend for themselves is no big deal. Either they are clueless and think that rabbits can fend for themselves or they do not care about the consequences of their actions as proven by littering.
Sure. But there is something very different about the animal case because most normal people make emotional connections with their pets.
I own a Norwegian forest cat he was a stray and then found and neutered as an adult. I pretty much know that he could survive just fine on his own by hunting rodents, which he sometimes does anyway. But I still wouldn't leave him to fend for himself because I know he's much happier as a pet and I also just don't want him to leave. That's the part I don't really get. And I'm not some bleeding heart animals should have human rights type person either. Even though squirrels are cute, I'm not shedding tears while cleaning one up that the cat brought in. It's a wild animal that got killed by a predator. That's just nature.
I don't understand the emotional calculus of doing thing to an animal you've lived with and taken care of for months. And I really don't think that is normal at all.
I'm really glad people don't leave comments for downvoting. Then this forum would be littered (heh) with completely useless 3-word comments "downvoted for x".
It's not that I'm so conserned with my points really. Just sometimes it sucks if people disapprove of what you said and you're not sure why. It's usually enough if just one person leaves a comment. Sometimes these things are just hard for me to interpret and it frustrates me a bit.
>What kind of people adopt a pet, and then release it into the wild?
I have a friend who just acquired a ball python because the frat house behind her left the snake tank, with the snake inside it, out with the trash can. Many people have no regard for animals and even less regard for their impact on the world around them.
A large number of invasive species in many countries are pets that were released in the wild. Snakes and gold fish are probably the most well known among them. Most humans are selfish I think people doing the right thing in private is a lot less common than people assume hence when someone does something unselfish it is celebrated.
Goldfish, turtles, snakes, lizards, rabbits, etc are all animals people bought for pets and then decided that they didn't want them and released them into the "wild" to be "free" without considering the consequences for the animal or the environment.
Fish and turtles immediately come to mind. I knew of somebody who released Siberian dwarf hamsters and for a brief period they multiplied in their backyard before the local red tailed hawk caught wind
where i live there are wild rabbits and in previous years the population has literally exploded.
The Rabbits are smart, they build a den under my deck knowing the dog cant reach them and the dog keeps other predators away.
Then a red tailed fox moved into the area... and now instead of finding whole rabbits roaming the neighbourhood, you find the odd rabbit component. Maybe a rear quarter here, or a front limb there.
Yeah, sounds like a win-win situation alright - the pet rabbit gets slaughtered, the children and parents are lied to. Your sister sounds like a great person.
Another story from a fellow hacker with a backyard goat - It actually starts in a very subtle way. Goats have different tastes and moods, and it's not like they eat everything right away unless the density of a goat per backyard m2 is too high. I started giving mine some free "roaming" time with the chickens every day before the sunset. It looked very innocent - first few days she ate just some weeds, nettle and some low hanging branches of pear trees. No worries, I was planning to cut those anyways. After few weeks of not paying that much attention in the evenings, bottom third of all our ~12 trees were gone, she got into salads, potatoes, zucchini, pumpkins, peppers and cucumbers, all nettle was done, and she started checking out tomatoes (which seemed that she is really really not into at first). I am building a new goat house with it's own separate "backyard" with weeds that she won't be able to escape. :)
I suspect you may be falling to overconfidence there.
Also, single goat? That's tough, I've done it by running the goat with a pack of dogs and treating it as a dog, but witha lone goat, who doesn't feel they have herd, keeping them happy is difficult.
You're right. I am aware of this, and we're planning to get one more goat and also a dog. Right now, the goat seems to be pretty happy roaming around the backyard with all the chickens. It even waits with them while they lay eggs, etc. Pretty cool. But sure, you're right :)
Do you mean the goat is eating the tomato fruit, or the tomato leaves?
The latter are toxic to (AIUI) all monogastrics, same as potatoes and other Solanum family plants - you may want to reign that behaviour in, assuming the animals are still alive.
I am aware of this and I was monitoring the behavior when she started approaching that part of the backyard. The goat is somewhat pretty smart because it does not touch the leaves at all. Just the fruits.
> Ruminants [...] are able to acquire nutrients from plant-based food by fermenting it in a specialized stomach prior to digestion [...] The word "ruminant" comes from the Latin ruminare, which means "to chew over again".
FYI, we were letting our goats and chickens roam at the same time, but hanging out with the goats and it was fine... until the goats figured out how to squeeze into the chicken run and gobble up the chicken feed.
Apparently they find it super tasty, but it's not vegetarian, so they shouldn't eat it. The chickens get into much less trouble and can roam mostly unsupervised; but we've got a lot of aerial preditors to watch out for.
When I was a child we had pigs and chickens next to each other. The chickens started sleeping atop the resting pig since it was warm. It was cute until the pig started devouring the chickens!
Lawrence Berkeley National Labs uses goats to tame the brush on the steep slopes surrounding the campus (over 45 degrees in many places). More than once I've had to wait on a bus for the herd of goats to transition across the main access road from one slope to the other.
They're pretty common in most of the East Bay hills. I've always wondered how many different herds there are though. Is it like 1-2 herds per city that move around constantly, or are there dozens of herds that spend a week vacationing in the big city every couple of months before they go back to the farm?
I looked into this for my yard. Unfortunately given how bad of a shape it is, it still would cost multiple thousands to clear with goats. Fortunately, it only costs a few hundred to buy some goats and do it over a longer time, with the bonus of making my niece happy.
in terms of goat's ability to eat almost literally anything, even the things you don't want them to eat, they have a saying in afghanistan (translated from the dari):
The map on this page has some sort of CSS issue in Firefox. It constantly resizes and shakes. Using the page zoom function is enough to get it to eventually stop.
My office landlords hired some goats (not from this company) to tame some overgrown bushes by a river. They arrived in a gutted school bus (which is where they slept over night). As far as I could tell, the procedure is: set up fence around area to be eaten, let out goats, and let them wander and eat for a few days. The end result wasn't very pretty, but it was remarkably effective.
From the perspective of the goats it must feel like they're on a luxury cruise. They get whisked around to new locations every day, they get out and gorge themselves on food, then back on board to the next location and plant buffet tomorrow. Nice lifestyle!
Hiring goats is one of the best methods to fight bush growth, especially if you clamp the high ones so the goats can reach everywhere. Sawing down on the other hand only gives more sprouts and stronger roots for the next years.
I looked into this a couple of times for an urban-ish lot with an overgrown backyard. (I don't have a green thumb!). There were several services in my area, including the awesomely-named Rent-a-ruminant.
Unfortunately, for smaller lots, it just isn't feasible - the way the pricing is structured, the setup fees get you. They are really for multi-acre lots where they set up significant fencing and leave the goats for several days.
Here in Northern Europe they just use GPS-enabled electric collars on the goats, and do literal geofencing with that. Then you don't have any cost of setting up physical fences. Of course you have to accept that the fence position has an inaccuracy 5-6 meters, so it only makes sense for large areas where there is nothing that will kill the goat if it strays a little outside the fence.
I'm pretty sure the collars can't cause deadly harm, just discomfort. I don't know anything about implementation details, but I assume that the shock strength varies such that the goats figure out they have to turn around.
Ah nice seeing something like this on HN. In India, it's common to hire goats for another, lets just say complementary reason. Their droppings are really good natural fertiliser. So farmers pay sheep/goat herders to get them to visit their farm for a few days before the sowing season.
Fantastic. I've got 1-1/4 acres that I've paid yearly to have cut. I worry about the workers because they encounter rattlesnakes. I've searched for goats to hire for several years, but not been able to find them. Very glad to discover this!
I second the recommendation. Don't be put off by Jeremy Clarkson and his persona, seeing a motorhead with a big ego trying to run a farm and make a profit is what makes the show. Thankfully, he's paired with someone that knows their stuff, with a sharp enough wit...
Just started watching it and it's great and hilarious! I guess one of the things that I'm enjoying a ton is that I also don't know anything about farming so I'm as surprised at Clarkson is. It's humbling (seems for Clarkson too) to see that I don't know everything...
It really is - because not only is it hilarious, it also highlights just how difficult modern farming has become - razor thin margins, at the whims of the weather, dealing with vandlism from local youths with nothing better to do etc. etc.
When was farming not on razor thin margins at the whims of the weather? At least US history is full of sharecropping where the farmers barely making ends meet and those with enough capital to own their own small farms not doing much better. Some of those who owned a lot of land with sharecroppers managed to do ok though. It's similar today, except sharecropping has gone out of style, I think. Big farms and little farms are on very thin margins, but thin margins on a small farm mean Clarkson made like a hundred pounds or something after a year (probably ignoring his capital costs).
My wife and I hired goats from a gentleman on Nextdoor to help clear our backyard in our newly purchased home (like ~10000sqft of overgrowth) - he dropped off 7 goats, and they performed admirably, were extremely calm and well behaved until they ran out of food, at which point they turn into food-hunting, petulant children. If you do this, make sure to get only as many as you need!
Well, they broke down my wood fence to get to the neighbors garden, hopped over the chain link fence on the far side to get to the public park, and started climbing onto my roof
Like the iframe and the parent are sending each other a message to match the heights of the content document and the iframe element but it miss-calculates producing a vertical scroll to appear, which then posts another message back to adjust again and so on, back and forth.
I've often seen this done. The Hetch Hetchy pipeline operator uses it to clean up their right of way, which goes up, down, and through hills. Someone puts up a temporary electric fence around the right of way, and they truck in about a hundred goats. The goats graze everything down to bare dirt, and are then moved on to the next section.
I've seen this done with sheep, too. Those are easier to herd but not as agile on rough terrain.
If you're talking about the Listings page, it'll probably display as blank if you have Javascript disabled. It loads a rather large accordion list per-state after the page loads.
We've got a service in Western New York (letsgoatbuffalo.com, clever play on Let's Go Buffalo!). They used an old school bus to transport the goats, which sadly burned down. But, the Western New York community raised $16,000 via a go fund me for a new bus!
I'm kind of surprised someone would use goats for this purpose instead of sheep. Sheep are dumb, docile and easy to manage. Goats are impossible to manage.
Ha, this reminded me of a similar service: goat rental for videoconferences [1] :). It was a hit during the pandemic, with everyone scrambling to combat screen fatigue in creative ways.
At my former working place we had a freelance consultant on retainer who looked into cutting his hours down for health reasons and thus explored new ventures. Because he already had a few sheep he decided to offer sheep rentals as a "biological" lawn cutter.
But there were 2 problems:
Sheep can be somewhat picky eaters, so they let some grass stand. But the bigger problem was, that while his prospective customers liked the idea of having their lawn cut "biologically", they pretty much did not like the sheep droppings the sheep left behind in practice.
I have property in a pretty rural area (Anza, CA) and every goat owner I know says that they're actually picky eaters. But these articles I see pop up now and then pretty much prove the opposite...
I have goats. They are picky eaters. They know what they want and what they don't. They will strip most trees and bushes to the branch. They will eat most grass, but not if it's too tall or has gone to seed or is too dried out. And they'll only eat it down to about 3-4 inches from the ground. There are certain plants I dig out of my pasture because the goats just won't eat them and I don't want them spreading and taking up more space.
There's truth that goats will put most things in their mouths. Almost every time I bring something new into their pen, they check to see if it's food. They'll even check me every now and then just to be sure I haven't become food in the past week. So, sure, you might see a goat pick up a tin can for a brief moment, but you'll also see it spit it out 5 seconds later.
I recently got into goats. Already have cows, chickens, and pigs on my hobby farm. Goats are without a doubt the most picky. I use pigs and goats for pretty much the same things, land clearing then food. Pigs are pure freaking destroy everything and then still eat what feed you give them. They also tear the crap out of the dirt, but they taste really good.
I agree goats are picky the point that if you keep an on them you can catch them before they tear up anything you want to keep(apple/peach trees). Another thing is goats are just dang fun. Pigs and cows are friendly in a dull sort of way, goats have character & personality. One of my goats will come out of his pen nightly just to hang around with me and the kids. When it gets tired of us he puts him self back in the pen.
My gf and I have a plot and are considering goats. There are trees there though, full grown conifers. Will they be at risk? No tree likes it to be stripped of its bark.
I've got three goats. They're picky, but mine have a pretty good amount of space and a variety of stuff to eat. They've each got their favorites, but crunchy dry cottonwood leaves and our dominant dandelion-alike are at the top of each list.
If you're using goats to clear land, you put more goats per space than the land can sustain, but just for a few days or weeks. The goats will eat their favorite things first, but then also other paletteable stuff. They'll also trample things down pretty good.
Yep, my neighbours keeps goats next to my propery, they escape once in a while. They go directly to the soft greens in my garden. When the fences hold they eat the area clean by type as you say. First the grass, then the leves of the small trees, then the bark (killing the small trees). Only when there is nothing else left will they eat the nettles.
I'm not familiar with goats. But this got me thinking: why would the goats even do that? Are they not well-fed? Are they hungry all the time? Do goats eat and poop 24/7 if left unchecked?
Yes. Many grazing animals are like this. It's like they have no "feeling full" in their tiny brains. Grass and leafs are not very calorie dense so they kind of have to.
Cows or horses can easily eat themselves sick if they are let into high grown grass fields. Where I live the horse owners will sometimes cut the grass in the fields before they let the horses go to it in the spring.
In the same vein regarding tackling invasive plants.
In Germany, I came to realize that many cities have unpaid "employees" to tame the city gardens, namely wild ducks, gooses and rabbits.
Thankfully people leave them be, back home they would have been snaped in less than a week.
However as they are used to humans, it also means they make themselves invited guests to any picknick if one doesn't pay attention to the "teams" taking care of the grass.
My dad hired goats to mow down his entire lot in the Hell's Canyon area of Eastern Washington. Saved his cabin from a wildfire, and got the dang thistles reduced to nothing. It was a bargain too, $400.
The head of HPE EMEA is married to the head of Palo Alto networks EMA sales...
They have an amazing home in Auburn, and they have a LOT of goats. My friend, who is married to the ex chief of staff for Cisco also bought a ranch in auburn and they have ~100 goats or so. They rent them out for ~$800 per acre to clear bramble and what not. I spent a week helping them move goats between projects earlier this summer and its a hell of a lot of work.
There are a lot of tech people that went and bought land with goats and have started goat businesses.
When goats eat weeds will they eat and destroy the whole weed? Or do they eat just down to the surface level of the ground which will let the weed grow back immediately?
Depends on the goat and the weed. My goats only like the flowers of dandelion analogues, but for some other weeds, one will try to get the whole thing out and the others just eat the leaves to the ground.
If you put them in a small space, you'll pretty much get bare earth either way though.
Tried hiring a local goat rental to tame my parents' yard, the guy on the phone complained about "this thing called a living wage" that he has to pay his workers. He won't take jobs less than 10 acres or his business runs at a loss. Many cities need regular plant clearing, though, so by reliably selling services to local city and county governments, his business will never fail.
This is amazing, good friend of the family rents out their goats to farmers and friends for the exact same purpose. Reduce pesticide use, naturally improve farm land all the while providing an ideal food source for meat goats, real ESG innovation at work!
In Britain, because they're classed as farm animals you'd need a Movement Order from DEFRA (Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs) to take one onto a public road, unfortunately.
Uhm, goats are by far the cheapest way to clear out certain kinds of brush and noxious plants. They're also cute and act like dogs.
Pesticides are dangerous and still leave a dead plant, machines jam (and lop off fingers,) doing it by hand takes a long time and can risk major rashes from poison ivy or cuts from thorns.
Part of my back yard is impenetrable from the kinds of plants goats eat.
There's going to be poop everywhere and potential damage if they aren't confined. They'll climb and gnaw on everything and anything. The goats will be spreading the weed seeds.
I'm not saying they are bad, I'm just saying you're being a schmuck if you pay someone to have their goats graze on your land.
You still need to operate one with a human, and goats don’t have a minimum wage.
(Also, because their method of destruction is eating, they also go for root systems and clear them whole; this is a very important feature in my area, as they’re used to kill blackberry, which does not die if you leave the roots.)
You prefer two stroke gasoline engines (Very environmentally unfriendly) vs goats because???
I've never seen city employees using "electric mowers"??? Probably because the battery life is simply useless for anything beyond a small yard?
On top of this, you prefer to pay unionized city worker wages to remove weeds instead of an environmentally friendly goat do it for almost nothing?
I saw 2 city workers trying to clear an area the other day. 3 hours later they were still there, gasoline burning trimmers screaming away. I'd say they had at lest a day of work left. Two workers, there all day - probably a few tanks of gas as well...
Personally, i'd prefer they had Goats as an option.. but that is just me.
I think he has a point there. If he did not pay for, it may be an even trade.
You'd just have to compare the cost per acre per month of machine maintenance vs the cost to maintain a well fed flock for a month; including land costs and property taxes if you own the land.
> I think he has a point there. If he did not pay for, it may be an even trade.
Not really - the cost of food for goats is fairly marginal all things considered. For this kind of service you have to account for transport, setup (usually fencing of some sort has to be put up), etc. as well as ongoing medical and shelter costs for when they aren’t working.
Story time - My dad asked the local school which had a goat if he can borrow it for a weekend. It was to tame his backyard. As the backyard was enclosed with no chance of the goat escaping, we left it by itself. The goat was be extremely hungry and ate everything insight including the roots, leaves and bark. By Monday, the backyard is barren and took months recover.
Moral of the story - keep an eye on the goat.
In German, there’s an old phrase: “Appointing the goat as gardener”. You use it when somebody is being made responsible for task for which he is not just incompetent, but where he will actually cause damage - for instance because he has ulterior motives.
Fantastic. I think most of the "equivalents" miss a lot of the nuance.
We don't expect the fox to be any good at guarding the chickens, but the goat could plausibly start out as a good gardener ("mowing" the grass and eating the weeds). But then through enthusiasm and love of the work end up ruining the garden...
Fox guarding the hen house seems like the English equivalent to that.
It's similar, but not quite equivalent.
The fox is malicious. It knows it will destroy the property, whereas the goat is happily oblivious to the destruction it brings.
> is not just incompetent, but where he will actually cause damage - for instance because he has ulterior motives.
That made me think it was more. And anyway, as much as the fox does with chickens, the goat knows it will set about to kill and eat plants. There's no real reason to call the fox knowingly malicious and the goat not.
>There's no real reason to call the fox knowingly malicious and the goat not.
I think we imagine foxes to have a level of cunning that a placid goat lacks.
Goats are anything but placid. They’re tricksters and bullies. They won’t hesitate to charge you from behind and knock you down. They will also happily chew on people’s clothing and long hair. Goats are jerks! They’re also just really funny and lovable.
Rascality and loveability are intertwined and inseparable
And thank goodness for that, otherwise I would be completely insufferable ;-)
Ha, you have not worked with goats before, have you?
Even some sheep like to sneak up and attack from behind. Goats even more so..
But sure most goats lack that bravery, but some have it and the cunning to attack and get to places they are not supposed to be.
Touché, I have zero experience of goats. Thanks for putting me right!
While the fox features in a larger variety of animistic stories, the goat is not without its own set of parables.
Only because their prey has a nervous system
In Hungarian, we mix the two of yours: Goat guarding the cabbage.
In Finland we have almost exactly the same: Goat guarding the gabbage patch.
And to the right, we say "Let the wolf guard the sheep" :)
That seems to imply maliciousness on the fox‘ side. The goat is merely ignorant.
Some goats are extremely malicious.
Goats are fundamental anarchists. They are not evil, they just have a chaotic energy beyond comprehension.
Yeah, you ever look at their evil little eyes. If that isn’t maliciousness distilled…
And yet in this corner of India, some butchers blindfold goats since they can't proceed while looking them in their cute eyes.
In fact that is why we call lucifer the goat-man, the joke in the tv series lucifer reason aside.
Or the goat is contained in too small of an area for too long. Much like an inexperienced person without supervision...
Norwegian equivalent:
«To let the billy watch the sack of oats.»
A billy/buck goat is a male goat.
The German proverb is also about a "Bock", same word, same meaning.
Can you share the German language phrase? I tried to Google for it, but I cannot find anything.
Den Bock zum Gärtner machen
"Pukki kaalimaan vartijana" for the Finnish equivalent (goat guarding the cabbage patch)
We have “fox guarding the henhouse” which is closer in tone to the Finnish phrase perhaps than the German one.
In Czech, "udělat kozla zahradníkem".
Is the emphasis of what will cause the damage more about the incompetence, or about more purposeful nefarity from the eg. ulterior motives?
I think most goats don't have sinister ulterior motives! Except for one goat but probably that's not the one in your garden
Meaning, I'm guessing it's about happy incompetence and thoughtlessness?
Goats' motivations are mostly to eat tasty tree bark and (some) other plants. Hardly incompetent or thoughtless, they're relentless if not contained.
I have three, and the only incompetence at play is when I accidentally don't contain them well enough. From my last event: https://fractaldragon.net/posts/2022-05-09_bloody_goats.html
Interesting read :-) With cats, apparently one can spray water on them when they're at the border to ones garden, and eventually, also when you aren't there, they still think they'll get water on themselves if they go outside the garden. So they don't -- a border has been created in their mind.
I wonder if that works with goats, instead of the gate? I guess not.
Maybe also doesn't work with smarter cats, hmm.
(I suppose it's not your boy in the video?)
> the stripped area can be bridged with thin shoots embedded into the bark on each end of the open wound
Didn't know, I was surprised to read that it actually worked :-)
I don't know if it would work on goats., They aren't fond of being rained on though, so maybe? They are really motivated however, and smart enough to figure it out.
The bridge grafting worked great! The tree never lost any leaves or flowers, now has plums on it. For what it's worth, the shoots I spliced are now brown on the outside like the regular bark.
And no, not my kid, but made me laugh.
I’m not sure. I’d say it’s mostly on hire unwise the choice is, and how predictable the results. Kinda like the fable The Scorpion and the Frog.
> ulterior motives. LOLLLLLL.
love that, thanks!
> with no chance of the goat escaping
Bold assumption there. As they say, "if it doesn't hold water it won't hold a goat."
My town stopped its annual “goats clear the park” setup because one goat would consistently escape and wreak havoc on traffic. Pretty solid enclosure, too
Sounds like they should replace it with "goats clear the park and BBQ"
An electric fence goes a long way, and can be portable. Works great as long as you remember to close the gate. cough
The same goat each time?
As long as extracting whatever food there is is less effort than circumventing the fence the goat will remain...
I think modeling a goat as a rational agent is also pretty bold :-)
You'd think so... but yeah, they have their own sort of smarts. Mine are very adept at reaching or finding tasty plants. One was less bright about plants on the other side of a fence that her horns fit through, one way. I had to rescue her about eight times, until the horns were long enough to not go through the fence wire.
And if it does hold water, they’ll climb it anyway.
https://youtu.be/RG9TMn1FJzc
I guess if we left the goat long enough, it will eat thorough the fence. Then the neighbours garden will also be barren.
I sense a mathematical question.
Many years ago I heard of a family whose goat ate through the thatch roof and then started eating stuff inside the house. Don’t leave the goat alone.
Not a goat farmer so not sure if goats do that. Anyone know?
Note that if tree bark is eaten all around the tree circumference, the tree dies.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Girdling
Yes, a couple of the trees needed replacing.
Looks like she goat herself in trouble
Perfect Reddit comment ;)
Goats are excellent land management if you have enough land and don't mind everything getting eaten to near the ground
our state DOT has rented goats to clean the sides of roads along highways in some rural areas, especially when there are large amount of noxious weeds. The person they hire strings up a bunch of short fiberglass poles for a mile or two along the highway with some wires, puts out some water, and then lets the goats in. Comes back and picks them up a couple of days later, and moves them to the other side.
Goats LOVE poison ivy and oak, and it doesn't hurt them. Don't let them near hemlock though (it will do the same to them as it did Socrates)
They seem to like Scotch broom as well. Some red-leafed garden ornamental is brutally toxic to them though, and it can be a slow, agonizing death.
Not just some wire but a portable electric fence.
Ok, I have to ask. Why did the school have goat?
It was a progressive school in the country side. I think most of the students are from the local farming community.
What I see is months of not needing to operate a mower.
You need sheep for that. Goats don't much like grass. I have to mow our paddock, except for when I borrowed a friend's sheep for a few days.
My sister has a small farm and in addition to cows and horses she also has rabbits. Every spring, parents show up to buy a rabbit to have at home. When the deal is done my sister takes the parents aside and tell them that if they plan or feel by the end of the summer that they want to let the rabbit loose, they can return it for free.
What she does not tell is that our brother-in-law is a chef and happily makes rabbit stew of the returned rabbits. If there was ever a win-win situation, this is it.
> If there was ever a win-win situation, this is it.
Say what? She lies via omission to the parents, forcing them to make an uninformed choice.
Instead of letting a rabbit loose in the wild, they might have sought another home for it, because they didn't want it to die. Your sister's lies mislead them into thinking they can safely return the rabbit.
They can, in fact, safely return the rabbit to the stew pot.
They're food. Rabbits. People eat them.
It's not better for the rabbit to be turned loose to be mauled to death by a housecat or eaten by a coyote. A shelter is going to euthanize, wasting good meat.
This is squeamishness masquerading as morality.
That's not the point. I have literally nothing against eating rabbits - they are delicious in fact.
I do hover, object to lying. Like OP said - they(everyone in fact) have the right to make an informed choice. By omitting this information, people who are returning a rabbit aren't making an informed choice. It's a trick, a ruse, if money was involved I'd call it a fraud.
Nothing to do with squeamishness.
They're returning the rabbits to the previous owners. There's no further expectation of duty to either party.
The situation implies that the person selling the rabbits as pets would attempt to rehome them or care for them as pets.
There's a difference between being technically correct, and being moral. While the language used is technically correct for the situation, omitting the information about where the rabbits end up is immoral.
Clearly OP understands that if the whole truth was told, they wouldn't be getting a free source of rabbit meat...
Is it dishonest to buy a rabbit and not mention that you're planning to eat/breed/keep it as a pet?
No of course not, it's none of the seller's business. If they say "hey we're vegan please don't eat our rabbits" that's a different matter, it would be at the very least polite to respect those wishes.
Why on Earth would returning a rabbit to a farm where they eat them be any different? In this case the possibility is perfectly clear.
I think the bit about it being a "farm where they eat them" is the key point.
If the person returning it knows that, then sure. The OP implied pretty heavily that they don't know the ultimate fate of the rabbits.
As far as these people know its "A farm where they sell breed and sell rabbits as pets", not a farm that raises them for meat.
"it's none of the seller's business"
In this case, the parties are close relatives, so I would argue that their threshold of duty to disclose such facts is somewhat higher than in case of complete strangers.
I would hardly call it immoral. If the owners are curious about the ultimate fate of the rabbit, they could simply ask before returning.
I think it doesn't occur to them that the rabbit's new home is in the oven. They wouldn't think about asking
I think the expectation is that since they bought the rabbit there and the rabbit was happily living there, when they return it, they expect it to still live. They think they are returning the rabbit to its "natural" environment and will happily live on the farm.
So there is no legal duty or obligation, but morally, the expectation on both parties are definitely not the same. Otherwise they would tell them that they would cook them when they return them. The fact they are hiding this information shows that expectations are not aligned.
Yeah but it's a farm... it's not a rabbit rescue and pet store
Did you miss the part where the sister says "that [if] they want to let the rabbit loose, they can return it for free"?
That's an outright lie, since they aren't letting the rabbit loose to live on the farm -- they're eating it.
what matters is not what we think. What matters is what the girl recovering the rabbits thinks. If she thinks that if she told the truth the rabbits wouldn't be returned to her, then by not saying anything, she is lying by omission.
The part which seems relevant is if the parents (or a random person) had the information that the rabbit would be made into stew, then that would likely change their decision to return the rabbit.
Are dogs food?
I was in Northern Vietnam in 2019, happily riding my rental scooter around.
I ride right past a dog on a rotisserie.
I stopped to talk to the guy and he showed me his sign that said Dog Meat. After learning the words for dog meat in Vietnamese, I saw the signs everywhere.
I've had dogs as pets for decades. I don't see why people cant eat them if they want to. I wouldn't eat my dog because of emotional attachments, but that doesn't mean that others who don't have emotional ties cant eat them.
But perhaps you can see why someone would be upset if you needed to pass your dog to someone else's care; and they ate them.
Are pigs food to Muslims?
Is there a culture where eating rabbit is taboo?
You said
> They're food. Rabbits. People eat them.
Well people eat dogs and pigs so then by the same logic they are food.
What is with all your edgelord stuff with rabbits. You need to work out some of your issues
Letting them free will likely get them eaten anyway, probably less humanly since they’ll still be alive while they are eaten. Or run over. These are domesticated rabbits, not wild ones.
What the parent post means is that the owners might not have let the rabbit free bit would find an other alternative, like keeping the rabbit anyway because they love it, giving the rabbit to a friend etc. But now they think their is this great alternative of giving the rabbit back but unknowingly killing it.
I’ve had several friends have rabbits in my lifetime. They all t eventually let them go instead of finding a new home. Each time I looked at them in horror while I imagined the lucky hawk having dinner.
Most people think rabbits are “natural” when they may actually be invasive. So they let them go. Finding a new home is the last thing on every one of these owners mind.
I could never imagine doing this to an animal I care about. This is sociopathic behaviour. Unless they believe the rabbit will survive, in which it's just wildly ignorant. And therefore irresponsible, because a rabbit owner should have a rough understanding of what a rabbit is and how they work.
It is quite sad and irresponsible, but extremely common.
There was a case here in Norway a few years back. A litter of dead kittens was found in the woods, wrapped in several layers of plastic bags. Inner layers had scratches proving the kittens were alive and not stillborn.
Hongkong has a _modest_ social problem related to freeing unwanted pets into the wild. There are numerous billboards and buses adverts warning people not to do it.
On the other hand, there is very real urban legend of a salt water crocodile that was captured in early 2000s in the Hongkong wild. It was hunted for months. Authorities have no idea if was a release, or travelled from nearby (more tropical) region. Read more about Pui Pui on Wiki: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pui_Pui_(crocodile) She is even on show at the Hongkong Wetland Park. But if you want to see salties in the wild without too much effort or stress, you can do that in Singapore at a wetland reserve near Kranji.
These are two contradictory reasons. Rabbits are considered invasive because there is a non-zero chance they will escape the hawk and reproduce.
It's not contradictory in the slightest, the odds of a domesticated and domestic rabbit surviving predation are effectively nil.
The odds that it manages a litter first are higher, especially if it escapes pregnant, which rabbits generally are if they're able to be. Those pups are feral, not domestic, and have moderately better odds. Given enough generations, the domesticated neoteny is selected out by predation and now you have an invasive population of feral rabbits which can survive in the wild.
Everyone dies eventually.
Yes, but not of predation. The number of rabbits which die of age or starvation in their burrows over the winter, or disease, is not zero.
My experience is that you don't let a rabbit go... you just stop trying to track the little lagomorph down after it chews through or digs under the fence for the third time.
Rabbits are good as prey, great as pests, bad as pets.
Would you rather be released from prison into a dangerous world or executed?
These are not wild rabbits.
You cannot release them into the wild, just like you can’t release penguins from the zoo into the wild. We spend most of our adult life teaching our children how to survive. Most people don’t teach their pets how to survive.
No offense, but your question makes no sense in the scope we are dealing with. But fwiw, most people released from prison don’t do so well with reintegration. Some don’t survive, some end up going back, and very few thrive.
People aren’t domesticated rabbits.
Rabbits are incredibly destructive of many environments. Have a look at New Zealand.
Then don't breed them, sell them as pets, then lie to parents and kill and eat them. Seems like an easy solution..
This is how I’ve always behaved, yet the problem remains.
Australia would like to have a word with you.
The whole thing was an Invisible initiation, there was never any rabbit.
There is no lie, only assumptions on their part.
Doesn't this produce a selection effect against cute rabbits? Parents are more likely to choose cute rabbits, those rabbits become pets, they either get returned and eaten or kept. So non-cute rabbits tend to live longer on the farm, and as such have more offspring and get selected for, and eventually the farm will be covered in ugly rabbits and your sister will not have any clients anymore.
Ugly rabbits probably get the stew treatment first
What kind of people adopt a pet, and then release it into the wild? People doing this with cats is one of the reasons stray cats are such a big problem in many places. People dumping cat litters in the woods and what not. And rabbits can be an ecological menace too if allowed to multiply, which they do like rabbits.
> What kind of people adopt a pet, and then release it into the wild?
Have you seen how much litter people throw on the ground? I think you might be giving the average person too much credit.
I'm not talking about cat litter I'm talking about litters of kittens. Who gives a fuck about litter?
Unless you're talking about litter as in garbage.
But if you think dumping helpless animals under your care to fend for themselves is morally equivalent to littering, I'm not even sure what to say to that. It's not even in the same ballpark.
I'm fairly confident that they meant garbage, yes.
Without commenting on the amount of badness, the point is that they're both bad things that people nonetheless manage to regularly do.
I know commenting on downvotes isn't kosher but I really wish downvoters would leave a comment on why. It could be 3 words: downvoted for x.
I'm really not sure what is so objectionable about asserting that animal abuse is not the same thing as littering.
Since you asked nicely: downvoted for using a specific type of language.
It’s the first part in the HN guidelines for comments:
“Be kind. Don't be snarky. Have curious conversation; don't cross-examine. Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community.”
Thank you. Yeah, I kind of misunderstood GGP as a deliberate misinterpretation of my usage of the countable noun "litter". And it ticked me off. Having grown up on 4chan and IRC, I'm often a bit surprised by what's considered snark on HN vs other parts of the internet. I'll try to adjust my weights in future.
I think that animal abuse is not the same thing as littering but that the type of people who litter are also the same type on irresponsible people who will think that leaving a rabbit to fend for themselves is no big deal. Either they are clueless and think that rabbits can fend for themselves or they do not care about the consequences of their actions as proven by littering.
Sure. But there is something very different about the animal case because most normal people make emotional connections with their pets.
I own a Norwegian forest cat he was a stray and then found and neutered as an adult. I pretty much know that he could survive just fine on his own by hunting rodents, which he sometimes does anyway. But I still wouldn't leave him to fend for himself because I know he's much happier as a pet and I also just don't want him to leave. That's the part I don't really get. And I'm not some bleeding heart animals should have human rights type person either. Even though squirrels are cute, I'm not shedding tears while cleaning one up that the cat brought in. It's a wild animal that got killed by a predator. That's just nature.
I don't understand the emotional calculus of doing thing to an animal you've lived with and taken care of for months. And I really don't think that is normal at all.
I'm really glad people don't leave comments for downvoting. Then this forum would be littered (heh) with completely useless 3-word comments "downvoted for x".
Be less concerned with your internet points.
It's not that I'm so conserned with my points really. Just sometimes it sucks if people disapprove of what you said and you're not sure why. It's usually enough if just one person leaves a comment. Sometimes these things are just hard for me to interpret and it frustrates me a bit.
> if people disapprove of what you said and you're not sure why
Good point, I've been mildly about about that me too in some cases (I'm sbd else)
>What kind of people adopt a pet, and then release it into the wild?
I have a friend who just acquired a ball python because the frat house behind her left the snake tank, with the snake inside it, out with the trash can. Many people have no regard for animals and even less regard for their impact on the world around them.
A large number of invasive species in many countries are pets that were released in the wild. Snakes and gold fish are probably the most well known among them. Most humans are selfish I think people doing the right thing in private is a lot less common than people assume hence when someone does something unselfish it is celebrated.
Goldfish, turtles, snakes, lizards, rabbits, etc are all animals people bought for pets and then decided that they didn't want them and released them into the "wild" to be "free" without considering the consequences for the animal or the environment.
Fish and turtles immediately come to mind. I knew of somebody who released Siberian dwarf hamsters and for a brief period they multiplied in their backyard before the local red tailed hawk caught wind
This!
where i live there are wild rabbits and in previous years the population has literally exploded.
The Rabbits are smart, they build a den under my deck knowing the dog cant reach them and the dog keeps other predators away.
Then a red tailed fox moved into the area... and now instead of finding whole rabbits roaming the neighbourhood, you find the odd rabbit component. Maybe a rear quarter here, or a front limb there.
This is not goat content.
Yeah, sounds like a win-win situation alright - the pet rabbit gets slaughtered, the children and parents are lied to. Your sister sounds like a great person.
It's seriously skeezy. One of those comments that makes me have less faith in humanity.
Agreed, that seems rather questionable.
Hmm, that does not sound right.
Your sister is a bad person
Another story from a fellow hacker with a backyard goat - It actually starts in a very subtle way. Goats have different tastes and moods, and it's not like they eat everything right away unless the density of a goat per backyard m2 is too high. I started giving mine some free "roaming" time with the chickens every day before the sunset. It looked very innocent - first few days she ate just some weeds, nettle and some low hanging branches of pear trees. No worries, I was planning to cut those anyways. After few weeks of not paying that much attention in the evenings, bottom third of all our ~12 trees were gone, she got into salads, potatoes, zucchini, pumpkins, peppers and cucumbers, all nettle was done, and she started checking out tomatoes (which seemed that she is really really not into at first). I am building a new goat house with it's own separate "backyard" with weeds that she won't be able to escape. :)
> won't be able to escape
I suspect you may be falling to overconfidence there.
Also, single goat? That's tough, I've done it by running the goat with a pack of dogs and treating it as a dog, but witha lone goat, who doesn't feel they have herd, keeping them happy is difficult.
You're right. I am aware of this, and we're planning to get one more goat and also a dog. Right now, the goat seems to be pretty happy roaming around the backyard with all the chickens. It even waits with them while they lay eggs, etc. Pretty cool. But sure, you're right :)
Do you mean the goat is eating the tomato fruit, or the tomato leaves?
The latter are toxic to (AIUI) all monogastrics, same as potatoes and other Solanum family plants - you may want to reign that behaviour in, assuming the animals are still alive.
I am aware of this and I was monitoring the behavior when she started approaching that part of the backyard. The goat is somewhat pretty smart because it does not touch the leaves at all. Just the fruits.
Goats are ruminants.
> Ruminants [...] are able to acquire nutrients from plant-based food by fermenting it in a specialized stomach prior to digestion [...] The word "ruminant" comes from the Latin ruminare, which means "to chew over again".
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruminant
TIL: So that's from where the word "ruminate" comes :-)
FYI, we were letting our goats and chickens roam at the same time, but hanging out with the goats and it was fine... until the goats figured out how to squeeze into the chicken run and gobble up the chicken feed.
Apparently they find it super tasty, but it's not vegetarian, so they shouldn't eat it. The chickens get into much less trouble and can roam mostly unsupervised; but we've got a lot of aerial preditors to watch out for.
at least she didn't eat the chicks.
When I was a child we had pigs and chickens next to each other. The chickens started sleeping atop the resting pig since it was warm. It was cute until the pig started devouring the chickens!
Lawrence Berkeley National Labs uses goats to tame the brush on the steep slopes surrounding the campus (over 45 degrees in many places). More than once I've had to wait on a bus for the herd of goats to transition across the main access road from one slope to the other.
They're pretty common in most of the East Bay hills. I've always wondered how many different herds there are though. Is it like 1-2 herds per city that move around constantly, or are there dozens of herds that spend a week vacationing in the big city every couple of months before they go back to the farm?
The East Bay Regional Park District publishes their grazing schedule with all of their contractors! I really like to plan trips to go see the goats. https://www.ebparks.org/sites/default/files/Goat-Grazing-Sch...
I know there are at least two goat rental companies, because the one I see on my hikes is different from the one in the link!
When a mower won't tend to those hills.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hQEFH_8fka4
And those hills are filled with poison oak. Guess it doesn’t bother the goats like it does humans!
Which reminds me of a very old joke:
Two friends meet in a bar.
Says one: "I've bought a goat."
Says the other: "A goat? Where do you keep it?"
"In the bedroom."
"In the bedroom? What about the smell?"
"Well, the critter will have to get used to it."
I looked into this for my yard. Unfortunately given how bad of a shape it is, it still would cost multiple thousands to clear with goats. Fortunately, it only costs a few hundred to buy some goats and do it over a longer time, with the bonus of making my niece happy.
in terms of goat's ability to eat almost literally anything, even the things you don't want them to eat, they have a saying in afghanistan (translated from the dari):
if you don't have any problems, buy a goat
The map on this page has some sort of CSS issue in Firefox. It constantly resizes and shakes. Using the page zoom function is enough to get it to eventually stop.
It jiggles in a most unpleasant manner for me as well.
I love these types of bugs. If these guys are going for a "Goat Simulator" vibe (notoriously buggy, part of the charm), they've nailed it.
Ha, that was my first thought too. It immediately reminded me of the absurdly buggy feeling you get playing Goat Simulator.
Same issue for me, I'm on Chrome Version 104.0.5112.79
My office landlords hired some goats (not from this company) to tame some overgrown bushes by a river. They arrived in a gutted school bus (which is where they slept over night). As far as I could tell, the procedure is: set up fence around area to be eaten, let out goats, and let them wander and eat for a few days. The end result wasn't very pretty, but it was remarkably effective.
From the perspective of the goats it must feel like they're on a luxury cruise. They get whisked around to new locations every day, they get out and gorge themselves on food, then back on board to the next location and plant buffet tomorrow. Nice lifestyle!
> to tame some overgrown bushes by a river.
Hiring goats is one of the best methods to fight bush growth, especially if you clamp the high ones so the goats can reach everywhere. Sawing down on the other hand only gives more sprouts and stronger roots for the next years.
I looked into this a couple of times for an urban-ish lot with an overgrown backyard. (I don't have a green thumb!). There were several services in my area, including the awesomely-named Rent-a-ruminant.
Unfortunately, for smaller lots, it just isn't feasible - the way the pricing is structured, the setup fees get you. They are really for multi-acre lots where they set up significant fencing and leave the goats for several days.
Here in Northern Europe they just use GPS-enabled electric collars on the goats, and do literal geofencing with that. Then you don't have any cost of setting up physical fences. Of course you have to accept that the fence position has an inaccuracy 5-6 meters, so it only makes sense for large areas where there is nothing that will kill the goat if it strays a little outside the fence.
What if the goat wanders into the wrong direction and get lost? Would it die of electric shock or would the collar run out of battery.. eventually
I'm pretty sure the collars can't cause deadly harm, just discomfort. I don't know anything about implementation details, but I assume that the shock strength varies such that the goats figure out they have to turn around.
Ah nice seeing something like this on HN. In India, it's common to hire goats for another, lets just say complementary reason. Their droppings are really good natural fertiliser. So farmers pay sheep/goat herders to get them to visit their farm for a few days before the sowing season.
I'm from India and I never heard of this.
I'm pretty sure people do this, but it's the "it's common" part that bothers me.
It's like saying Indians are vegetarians. All Indians aren't.
Whenever I hear someone say "(X) is common" in any country with more than about 20 million people, I just mentally append "in my area".
Fantastic. I've got 1-1/4 acres that I've paid yearly to have cut. I worry about the workers because they encounter rattlesnakes. I've searched for goats to hire for several years, but not been able to find them. Very glad to discover this!
Where are you?
A friend of mine runs "https://www.scapegoats.net/"
And the head of HPE Sales has something like several hundred goats, but I dont know their site info.
Alameda County, Ca.
Just finished watching Clarkson's Farm; Jeremy got some sheep for this purpose. Recommend watching.
I second the recommendation. Don't be put off by Jeremy Clarkson and his persona, seeing a motorhead with a big ego trying to run a farm and make a profit is what makes the show. Thankfully, he's paired with someone that knows their stuff, with a sharp enough wit...
Just started watching it and it's great and hilarious! I guess one of the things that I'm enjoying a ton is that I also don't know anything about farming so I'm as surprised at Clarkson is. It's humbling (seems for Clarkson too) to see that I don't know everything...
perhaps one of the finest shows since streaming became a thing
It really is - because not only is it hilarious, it also highlights just how difficult modern farming has become - razor thin margins, at the whims of the weather, dealing with vandlism from local youths with nothing better to do etc. etc.
When was farming not on razor thin margins at the whims of the weather? At least US history is full of sharecropping where the farmers barely making ends meet and those with enough capital to own their own small farms not doing much better. Some of those who owned a lot of land with sharecroppers managed to do ok though. It's similar today, except sharecropping has gone out of style, I think. Big farms and little farms are on very thin margins, but thin margins on a small farm mean Clarkson made like a hundred pounds or something after a year (probably ignoring his capital costs).
He makes bank on the Diddly Squat Farm Shop though - great produce, but not cheap. His hot sausage is AMAZING if you're a heat fan.
My wife and I hired goats from a gentleman on Nextdoor to help clear our backyard in our newly purchased home (like ~10000sqft of overgrowth) - he dropped off 7 goats, and they performed admirably, were extremely calm and well behaved until they ran out of food, at which point they turn into food-hunting, petulant children. If you do this, make sure to get only as many as you need!
> they turn into food-hunting, petulant children
What more previously do they do then? (When in petulant children mode)
Well, they broke down my wood fence to get to the neighbors garden, hopped over the chain link fence on the far side to get to the public park, and started climbing onto my roof
Wow! Petulant? Riot children :-)
The map judders uncontrollably on Firefox for me.
Same here, Version 104.0.5112.81 (Official Build) (64-bit) Chrome
Same here, it constantly alternates between two sizes.
Same here on Edge.
Also on Chrome, I'm pretty sure it's a joke.
It does look like a bug.
Like the iframe and the parent are sending each other a message to match the heights of the content document and the iframe element but it miss-calculates producing a vertical scroll to appear, which then posts another message back to adjust again and so on, back and forth.
The list of services is blank.
I've often seen this done. The Hetch Hetchy pipeline operator uses it to clean up their right of way, which goes up, down, and through hills. Someone puts up a temporary electric fence around the right of way, and they truck in about a hundred goats. The goats graze everything down to bare dirt, and are then moved on to the next section.
I've seen this done with sheep, too. Those are easier to herd but not as agile on rough terrain.
> The list of services is blank.
If you're talking about the Listings page, it'll probably display as blank if you have Javascript disabled. It loads a rather large accordion list per-state after the page loads.
AH. I have "powr.io"'s spammy tracking widgets blocked.
We've got a service in Western New York (letsgoatbuffalo.com, clever play on Let's Go Buffalo!). They used an old school bus to transport the goats, which sadly burned down. But, the Western New York community raised $16,000 via a go fund me for a new bus!
Same service OP is talking about? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32434474
The city of Rotterdam has sheep that are owned by the city and shepherded by a city employee.
https://www.rotterdam.nl/wonen-leven/grazers/
I'm kind of surprised someone would use goats for this purpose instead of sheep. Sheep are dumb, docile and easy to manage. Goats are impossible to manage.
Goats and sheep have different grazing behavior. Sheep are great for grasses, but goats will happily eat everything- shrubs, grass, name it.
Much more detail on one of the listed goat rental companies:
https://www.santafenewmexican.com/news/business/local-goatsc...
Ha, this reminded me of a similar service: goat rental for videoconferences [1] :). It was a hit during the pandemic, with everyone scrambling to combat screen fatigue in creative ways.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32435090
I visited the goat rental page and got a picture of an Alpaca. I want my money back.
Less than three weeks ago, goats as a service was a topic of discussion on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32191140
(A nice example of comments drifting away from the putative topic)
At my former working place we had a freelance consultant on retainer who looked into cutting his hours down for health reasons and thus explored new ventures. Because he already had a few sheep he decided to offer sheep rentals as a "biological" lawn cutter.
But there were 2 problems: Sheep can be somewhat picky eaters, so they let some grass stand. But the bigger problem was, that while his prospective customers liked the idea of having their lawn cut "biologically", they pretty much did not like the sheep droppings the sheep left behind in practice.
I have property in a pretty rural area (Anza, CA) and every goat owner I know says that they're actually picky eaters. But these articles I see pop up now and then pretty much prove the opposite...
I have goats. They are picky eaters. They know what they want and what they don't. They will strip most trees and bushes to the branch. They will eat most grass, but not if it's too tall or has gone to seed or is too dried out. And they'll only eat it down to about 3-4 inches from the ground. There are certain plants I dig out of my pasture because the goats just won't eat them and I don't want them spreading and taking up more space.
There's truth that goats will put most things in their mouths. Almost every time I bring something new into their pen, they check to see if it's food. They'll even check me every now and then just to be sure I haven't become food in the past week. So, sure, you might see a goat pick up a tin can for a brief moment, but you'll also see it spit it out 5 seconds later.
I recently got into goats. Already have cows, chickens, and pigs on my hobby farm. Goats are without a doubt the most picky. I use pigs and goats for pretty much the same things, land clearing then food. Pigs are pure freaking destroy everything and then still eat what feed you give them. They also tear the crap out of the dirt, but they taste really good.
I agree goats are picky the point that if you keep an on them you can catch them before they tear up anything you want to keep(apple/peach trees). Another thing is goats are just dang fun. Pigs and cows are friendly in a dull sort of way, goats have character & personality. One of my goats will come out of his pen nightly just to hang around with me and the kids. When it gets tired of us he puts him self back in the pen.
My gf and I have a plot and are considering goats. There are trees there though, full grown conifers. Will they be at risk? No tree likes it to be stripped of its bark.
I've got three goats. They're picky, but mine have a pretty good amount of space and a variety of stuff to eat. They've each got their favorites, but crunchy dry cottonwood leaves and our dominant dandelion-alike are at the top of each list.
If you're using goats to clear land, you put more goats per space than the land can sustain, but just for a few days or weeks. The goats will eat their favorite things first, but then also other paletteable stuff. They'll also trample things down pretty good.
They will eat all the grass and then shrubs and then small bushes and trees including stripping all the bark.
Not animals you want around flora you care about.
Yep, my neighbours keeps goats next to my propery, they escape once in a while. They go directly to the soft greens in my garden. When the fences hold they eat the area clean by type as you say. First the grass, then the leves of the small trees, then the bark (killing the small trees). Only when there is nothing else left will they eat the nettles.
I'm not familiar with goats. But this got me thinking: why would the goats even do that? Are they not well-fed? Are they hungry all the time? Do goats eat and poop 24/7 if left unchecked?
> Do goats eat and poop 24/7 if left unchecked
Yes. Many grazing animals are like this. It's like they have no "feeling full" in their tiny brains. Grass and leafs are not very calorie dense so they kind of have to.
Cows or horses can easily eat themselves sick if they are let into high grown grass fields. Where I live the horse owners will sometimes cut the grass in the fields before they let the horses go to it in the spring.
In the same vein regarding tackling invasive plants.
In Germany, I came to realize that many cities have unpaid "employees" to tame the city gardens, namely wild ducks, gooses and rabbits.
Thankfully people leave them be, back home they would have been snaped in less than a week.
However as they are used to humans, it also means they make themselves invited guests to any picknick if one doesn't pay attention to the "teams" taking care of the grass.
Inspiration: Ask HN: Do you maintain a list of RSS links of GOAT blogs https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32191140
And, yes, my cousin's goat business is listed: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32191666
Goat Ops[0] is real!
[0] https://www.goatops.com/
My dad hired goats to mow down his entire lot in the Hell's Canyon area of Eastern Washington. Saved his cabin from a wildfire, and got the dang thistles reduced to nothing. It was a bargain too, $400.
The head of HPE EMEA is married to the head of Palo Alto networks EMA sales...
They have an amazing home in Auburn, and they have a LOT of goats. My friend, who is married to the ex chief of staff for Cisco also bought a ranch in auburn and they have ~100 goats or so. They rent them out for ~$800 per acre to clear bramble and what not. I spent a week helping them move goats between projects earlier this summer and its a hell of a lot of work.
There are a lot of tech people that went and bought land with goats and have started goat businesses.
When goats eat weeds will they eat and destroy the whole weed? Or do they eat just down to the surface level of the ground which will let the weed grow back immediately?
Depends on the goat and the weed. My goats only like the flowers of dandelion analogues, but for some other weeds, one will try to get the whole thing out and the others just eat the leaves to the ground.
If you put them in a small space, you'll pretty much get bare earth either way though.
Tried hiring a local goat rental to tame my parents' yard, the guy on the phone complained about "this thing called a living wage" that he has to pay his workers. He won't take jobs less than 10 acres or his business runs at a loss. Many cities need regular plant clearing, though, so by reliably selling services to local city and county governments, his business will never fail.
> reliably selling services to local city and county governments
And cities are starting to do this more regularly too. E.g. NYC's Riverside park was cleared with goats this year. (https://www.reuters.com/world/us/goats-released-new-york-cit...)
My parents had goats.
The problem with goats for your nice landscape is that they will nibble at everything including your trees and any shrubbery.
The map got all jittery on me and would not stop. All I did is scroll down the page. Running some version of Edge on Windows 10.
I’ve rented bees, I would like to try a goat. Last one I met was great, but some are complete arseholes.
With goats and bees you could be living in the land of milk and honey.
Goats' honey just ain't that good...
Bee milk is extremely spicy, but each bee can only be milked once and doesn't produce very much.
You can harvest venom and it’s worth quite a lot.
It does seem a bit like bee torture though.
Huh, TIL.
> It does seem a bit like bee torture though.
Agreed. Though I'm not sure how simple a brain has to be before I can stop caring, I prefer to opt on the side of caution.
This is amazing, good friend of the family rents out their goats to farmers and friends for the exact same purpose. Reduce pesticide use, naturally improve farm land all the while providing an ideal food source for meat goats, real ESG innovation at work!
When I saw the title, I thought that it's about hiring The Greatest Of All Times people. LMAO
If you think about it, this is probably the most ecologically friend method of clearing scrub and weeds. No chemicals involved!
The only thing I wonder about is whether the weed seeds would regrow. But I’d imagine clearing it on the second round would be easier.
https://www.cronkshawfoldfarm.co.uk/goatsonzoom
You're welcome!
Seems that NSW has 1 in the northernmost area (Byron) and 1 in the sothernmost area (Bega). I'm sure there's probably some Goats in between.
This has become pretty common over the last few years in Atlanta for clearing out larger wild areas - they make short work of it
Does anyone know how much this tends to cost in an actual direct X goats for X days tends to cost about this much sort of way?
No goats in New Hampshire or Vermont? I guess those farms don't have internet access...
Couldn’t one also rent goats just to appear in video calls?
I thought this would let you would hire 10X programmers...
I am waiting for GaaS
You don't rent a goat, you lease that surly bastard
Goats are the future of transportation.
In Britain, because they're classed as farm animals you'd need a Movement Order from DEFRA (Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs) to take one onto a public road, unfortunately.
https://www.gov.uk/guidance/sheep-and-goat-keepers-how-to-re...
(Yeah, I'd once looked into using a 'goat and cart' as a from of transport!)
Thor knew best all along!
You had me at goat rentals!
GaaS - Goats as a Service
Where to hire tyson
I thought we were opposed to the Nanny state?
I have my chromium browser window at half screen width - the map rapidly resizes itself in a busy loop. Makes you a bit nauseous to look at it.
Firefox too - a scroll bar appears and disappears in a loop until it eventually converges and stops.
Same for me at full screen. Fascinating service though!
They're better at goats than web design.
Yep, the map is funky!
The "world" seems to be made up of Canada, the US and Australia
Also New Zealand but not their world. I heard they have more goats and sheep than human. Just not sure you need to rent one.
Also New Zealand. I heard they have more goats and sheep than human. Just not sure you need to rent one.
Goatscaping
So you want me to pay you to feed your goats?
Uhm, goats are by far the cheapest way to clear out certain kinds of brush and noxious plants. They're also cute and act like dogs.
Pesticides are dangerous and still leave a dead plant, machines jam (and lop off fingers,) doing it by hand takes a long time and can risk major rashes from poison ivy or cuts from thorns.
Part of my back yard is impenetrable from the kinds of plants goats eat.
There's going to be poop everywhere and potential damage if they aren't confined. They'll climb and gnaw on everything and anything. The goats will be spreading the weed seeds.
I'm not saying they are bad, I'm just saying you're being a schmuck if you pay someone to have their goats graze on your land.
Get your own grazers or let them do it for free.
Also, goats deal really well with sloped areas that machines and people struggle with.
Where I live they get used a lot on highway embankments.
Electric mowers and brush cutters solved that years ago. They weigh nothing.
You still need to operate one with a human, and goats don’t have a minimum wage.
(Also, because their method of destruction is eating, they also go for root systems and clear them whole; this is a very important feature in my area, as they’re used to kill blackberry, which does not die if you leave the roots.)
So...
You prefer two stroke gasoline engines (Very environmentally unfriendly) vs goats because???
I've never seen city employees using "electric mowers"??? Probably because the battery life is simply useless for anything beyond a small yard?
On top of this, you prefer to pay unionized city worker wages to remove weeds instead of an environmentally friendly goat do it for almost nothing?
I saw 2 city workers trying to clear an area the other day. 3 hours later they were still there, gasoline burning trimmers screaming away. I'd say they had at lest a day of work left. Two workers, there all day - probably a few tanks of gas as well...
Personally, i'd prefer they had Goats as an option.. but that is just me.
I think he has a point there. If he did not pay for, it may be an even trade.
You'd just have to compare the cost per acre per month of machine maintenance vs the cost to maintain a well fed flock for a month; including land costs and property taxes if you own the land.
> I think he has a point there. If he did not pay for, it may be an even trade.
Not really - the cost of food for goats is fairly marginal all things considered. For this kind of service you have to account for transport, setup (usually fencing of some sort has to be put up), etc. as well as ongoing medical and shelter costs for when they aren’t working.
TIL Michael Jordan nor Tom Brady are featured on hiregoats.com... which is a shame
came here for this joke.
( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)
I know where you're coming from.