Training & Behavior

The goat is a Saanen named Dennis, white, calm-faced, and possessed of an intelligence that expresses itself almost entirely as trespass. We put up a new fence around the orchard because Dennis had eaten the lower third of every tree in the old one, and for three days he respected it the way a cat respects a closed door, which is to say not at all but with better timing.

He found the weak post first. Goats are engineers with hooves. They test a fence the way you might lean on a railing, casually, to see what gives, and Dennis leaned on the post by the gate where the ground had sunk and the wire had gone slack. A few butts, a wiggle, and the post tilted enough that he could push the mesh out and slip through the gap like a fat comma escaping a sentence.

He did not bolt. That is the scary part. A panicked animal runs. Dennis walked, slowly, to the nearest apple tree, looked back once as if to confirm I was watching, and began to eat with the deliberate calm of a man who has earned his lunch. He had opened the fence and was treating the orchard as a restaurant he had unlocked himself.

We fixed the post. He found the next weak point, a clip that had not been ratcheted tight, and worked it loose with the same patient shoulder. Goats do not give up on a puzzle that has a food reward behind it. The fence was a series of problems, and Dennis was solving them in order of easiest first, the way any sensible creature would, and I started to feel like I was losing a slow chess match to a animal with a beard.

The fix was not stronger fencing, though we did that too. The fix was removing the reward. We moved the orchard trees he loved out of reach, gave him a designated browse area with branches cut for him, and made the escape lead nowhere worth the effort. A goat that opens a door to nothing loses interest in the door, and Dennis, denied the apple, went back to being a placid white lump in the sun, which is what he is underneath the trespass.

People blame goats for being destructive. They are not destructive. They are problem solvers with a stomach, and the problem is always how to reach the next green thing. Out-think the reward and you out-think the goat. Out-fence him and he will just find the clip you missed, because he will, and he will remember it longer than you remember you put it there.

Dennis also learned the schedule of the person who fed him, and timed his escapes to the hour when the yard was empty, which told me the trespass was not random rebellion but calculated opportunism, a goat reading the humans the way we read a bus timetable. Once I changed the routine, fed him from the far side, and walked the fence line at the times he had been exploiting, the pattern broke, because the window he had been using was no longer open, and a closed window is the only fence a goat respects.

The browse area became the real solution. I cut apple and willow branches and stacked them in a rack he could not pull down, and he poured his engineering into that instead of the fence, because the reward was now delivered to him without the effort of escape. Dennis stopped being a fugitive and became a patron, and the orchard, for the first time since he arrived, kept its lower branches through a full season, which the trees, if they could, would have thanked me for.

The children adore Dennis now that he has stopped escaping, because a goat that stays put is a goat you can sit beside, and they sit with him in the browse area braiding the bits of his beard he lets them reach. He tolerates the braiding with the long-suffering air of a monarch permitting a minor ceremony, and the orchard, safe behind the fence he no longer tests, drops apples they collect in a bucket he is no longer quick enough to steal, a peace that took a season of engineering to earn.

Winter changed the game again. The browse branches dried and the reward inside the fence shrank, and Dennis, true to form, revisited the gate where the ground had heaved with the frost and found a new slackness I had not spotted. I caught him mid-push, fixed the post with a stake driven deep, and learned the lesson the frost taught: a goat's fence is only as good as its weakest point after the weather moves, and the inspection he forces on me is the cheapest insurance the orchard has, even if it comes wrapped in a beard and a look of pure calculation.