Feeding & Nutrition

We bought the goat on a Tuesday because the brambles had eaten half the allotment. A neighbor said goats clear anything. She was right about the brambles and wrong about everything else.

His name was Bram, short for nothing, and for two weeks he was a saint. He took the thorns down to the roots, nibbled the dock leaves, even stood on his hind legs to strip the hedge of its blackberries before I could reach them. The allotment looked better than it had in a decade. I told everyone at the pub. I was that smug.

Then he found the washing line.

It was a Sunday. I had pinned out a week of shirts and the good tablecloth my mother sent. Bram walked the length of the line like a man at a buffet, unhooked a peg in his teeth, and ate the tablecloth. Not chewed. Ate. The cloth, the pegs, a sock still damp from the rinse. My wife watched from the kitchen window and did not laugh. Not once.

After that the line became his favorite restaurant. He learned he could shake the whole thing loose by butting the post, and then the laundry was simply on the ground, at goat height, free. I tried moving it higher. He jumped. I tried a pole he could not reach. He dragged a crate over and climbed it. Goats are quieter than you think when they are committing a crime.

Food-wise, the lesson was simpler than the laundry damage. Bram would eat anything green and most things not green. Cabbage leaves, rose trimmings, the tops of carrots he pulled himself. But he turned his nose up at bought goat mix, the pelleted stuff in a sack, even when I wet it. He wanted live food, food with a story, food he had to work for. So I stopped buying the mix. The allotment fed him and the brambles stopped coming back because he grazed the new shoots the same afternoon they appeared.

People ask if goats are cheap pets. They are not. The fencing cost more than the animal. The replacement tablecloth cost more than the fencing. But his coat, once dull and patchy, went glossy that summer from nothing but hedge and veg, and the vet said his teeth were the best she had seen in a rescue goat. Bram had been starved before us, and the eating was partly the fear that food would vanish. Once he trusted the line would be refilled, he slowed down.

I still hang the washing indoors now. Bram has the run of the lower garden and the brambles have not returned in three years. The shirts are safe. The goat is fat and suspicious of the post, and every evening he waits by the gate for the windfall apples, which he considers his by right of residency. I have stopped arguing. He cleared the brambles. He earned the orchard.

The fence was the real education. I bought the cheap roll first, the green plastic mesh, and Bram walked through it the first night like it was fog. Goats test every boundary by leaning, and the mesh leaned back and let him through. The second fence was proper stock netting with a hot line along the top, and even then he only respected it after one careful nose touch to the wire taught him the boundary had teeth. After that he stayed. The lesson for me was that cheap solutions cost twice, once in money and once in laundry.

Winter changed the feeding question entirely. The hedge went bare, the veg died back, and Bram stood at the gate looking thinner. I caved and bought a sack of goat mix again, but this time I scattered it in the bramble regrowth so he had to graze to reach it, which kept him moving and kept the new shoots down. He ate it without complaint when it was part of a hunt rather than a bowl. I think the bowl bored him. Goats are foragers, not diners, and a goat with nothing to browse is a goat with a hobby vacancy, which he filled with my clothes.

Now the orchard is his and the line is indoors and the feed bill is a sack every six weeks instead of a joke. If you are thinking of a goat for land clearance, know this: he will clear the land and then he will clear your patience, and you will end up fencing better than you ever meant to. Bram was worth it. The tablecloth was not.

A year on, the brambles have not come back and the washing has not been eaten, which I count as the only two wins that matter. Bram greets me at the gate each evening and I have stopped trying to reason with a goat about laundry. He is what he is, a clearing machine with a side hobby in shirts, and the fence keeps the shirts safe while he works the land. The neighbor who told me goats clear anything was right, she just left out the part about the line.