I recently wrote a piece for my monthly newsletter about our goat Wilbur and he got so much loving feedback I thought I’d share him here with you all too 🙂
| This is Wilbur, approximately eleven years old. We bought Wilbur and his companion, Meg (who we sadly had to euthanise halfway through 2021 due to an incurable leg injury) in the same way we usually acquire our animals… which is to say with no prior thought but rather a fortuitous meeting and a spontaneous decision to take them home. On a whim, we had decided to head out to the Kin Kin markets one day and arrived to find two large goats tied up, for sale. The seller had a number of animals there to sell (ducks, chickens, goats, a piglet), all being sold for dinner tables. Wilbur is a BIG boy! (We recently wormed him as though he was 100kg, which the vet agreed he might well be, though of course we don’t have scales large enough to get a truly accurate picture.) He is a Boer cross. Boer goats are specifically bred as meat goats and they weigh a considerable amount, if Wilbur is anything to go by. He is a smoochy boy who was hand-raised inside a house and has always asserted that is exactly where he should still be! We take him out for walks on a lead and we follow him in what we are sure we could sell as a meditative practice of ‘goat led walking’. He isn’t nice to small children, though, and we can’t let them in the same space as him as he likes to head butt them, and if he’s on the other side of the fence he will repeatedly head butt the fence just so everyone is clear who is boss. He is delightfully photogenic and will happily pose for photographs, staring deeply into the camera. He also grows an enormous winter coat that takes around six months to come out and I help by pulling out long tufts that I would be able to spin into blankets if I had a spinning wheel. It’s an enticing idea that sparks all sorts of story ideas 🙂 He loves having his rump scratched and wags his tail with delight. He is a big boy with an even bigger personality, equal parts cuddly, talkative, bossy and destructive! Life is never dull with Wilbur around. |
Josephine Moon 