There is something about the smell of goat meat. The easiest comparison to draw is with lamb, but the truth is a good piece of lamb is recognized worldwide as a choice meat. Goat is, at best, the meat of no choice. It stinks, literally. Its so lean that it cooks tough almost any way you try. Its no surprise that just about the only way you'd want to eat goat is drenched in a potent curry or swimming in a 12 hour stew...and that because there just isn't anything else...
Here's the thing - goat meat stinks because goats stink. Their body odor smells like it is derived from their waste. Or maybe its their waste that is tinged with their musk. I am not really sure which came first, the stink or the stinker, but I am sure of this: Where there are goats there is the smell, and I don't like it.
Goats are relatively easy to raise. They eat anything. They are cheap and provide a means to milk and cheese and protein. I understand their reason for existence. But you know what, they're not nice animals. They aren't cute, they aren't affectionate, they aren't loyal, and they aren't even beasts of burden. So even though I know their purpose, I own no inkling of sentimentality or fondness for a goat. There is a reason for the term scapegoat. Someone's goat ate his crop, his flowers, and his wife's blouse and that man beat his goat (which suffered no remorse) and wondered why he kept the wretched animal. The four ounces a week of smelly milk, cheese, and meat just weren't worth it. Naturally, that goat took the blame for just about every other failure that man suffered in life. And he told his friends. You know, even after the Lamb of God was crucified we didn't convert to using "scapelamb." I'm just saying...
So the stage is set. Its about 11 am Tuesday, the 1st of May. My 7.78 year old daughter Angelina frantically throws the door open screaming, "THE GOAT IS HAVING B-A-B-I-E-S!!!" Immediately arrested by her manic enthusiasm I jump to my bare feet and run out the door with her, never fully considering the implications that our over-sized herbivorous farm rat is creating more of the same. This was a grave mistake because as it turns out, she needed help.
Now, I will not address the reasons why we own goats, mostly because it is a blight on my name and because I would need others who aren't present at this time to do so. But I will say this, when choosing between explaining to my way-over-the-top excited daughter why one of the baby goats died right before her eyes or trying to save it from prematurely experiencing its destiny, I chose the latter. And it was a mess.
Lets just say Momgoat's instincts weren't very forgiving to one of her babies. The second born, and smaller of the two kids, was less responsive than the first. Momgoat seemed to know something because she wasted little time or energy on that kid. She didn't want to clean it or let it nurse. So in I went. Armed with a damp dish towel (now retired) I wiped the baby clean. The next step was getting it fed ASAP. This was a group effort, but I was the one head-locking Momgoat, running barefoot through the matrix of dirt, poop, and birth effects, covered in the baby's old bathwater.
I also got to milk her first. I have had some good experience milking farm animals in the past, so clearly this is simply a survival skill that I was able to use at a critical moment. Don't be fooled into thinking any of these were acts of goat compassion. There isn't much I wouldn't do for my daughters.
Thankfully, most of the team was fully engaged at this point. We were a group juggling act, between Googling for help, brewing black coffee to stimulate the baby goat, and tag-teaming the precarious milking/bottle feeding operation. Soon I would see my relief.
At this point, I would like to take this story in a different direction. The details of goat birth aren't much different than the rest of goat existence. Smelly and mostly useless, with glimmers of life and the feeling of reward quickly replaced by feelings of disgust, remorse, and even shame. After all of the hard work and Javen & Caitlin and Allyssa's 36 hour nursing efforts, the 2nd kid never made it. Inherently death is a sad thing, and I wished it turned out better for the goat. The tears my daughters shed were not easy for this daddy to feel. But I am most distraught by the fact that I really felt emotional at times in the fight for this "farm rat's" life.
Thankfully, there was a survivor in all of this, and my children were able to take many things from this experience. Not only was their Mennonite home school curriculum perfectly augmented by a day on the farm, but we had some meaningful conversations about life and death, and they got to journal about their feelings. I even got to touch a few of mine. Not that I like goats now or anything, but I have a vested interest in giving "Junior" his shot at eating one of our flower beds.
So RIP, baby goat. It should have never been this way. I never signed up for this. But wait - I am a third world missionary - maybe I did.
