Nov. 23
It’s been a time of high romance on the farm! All the nanny goats are coming into season, and we, like all the other goat owners in the area, have been scrambling around trying to solve the billy problem.
The billy problem is this – billies are big, and they smell. And most people don’t want to keep them around. Since you only need them once a year, to put the nannies in kid so that you can milk them, it makes more sense to have just a few billies around. Then you can transport the nannies to the billies – or the other way around – when it’s time.
In practice, there are fewer and fewer goat keepers around the area. Goat keeping seems to have had its heyday back in the 80s and it’s been dwindling ever since. So there are fewer billies around, and each year this problem dawns with a new intensity on the owners of nannies who absolutely have to find them!
You would think that there would be an organized registry of billies, and of course there is. The British Goat Society keeps one, and so does the Anglo Nubian Breed Society. But those billies tend to be a six or eight or ten hour drive away – and although we love our goats, we don’t love them quite that much! So we fall back on the old word of mouth system, wherein you ring someone and ask if they know of anyone who has a billy. The Welsh jungle drums…and they’re remarkably effective!
This year we ended up borrowing a billy from a friend, to take our Anglo Nubian girls on – ahem – “dates.” Poor Hercules the billy. He was very young – if well intentioned – and if he were human, would have glasses, spots and buckteeth. He manfully did his best, but our glossy girls were about twice his size, and they would roll their eyes at me, look at me with upcast eyes, as if to say, “Is this as good as it gets?”
But the thing about Hercules is that he was so easy to handle, and so easily intimidated himself, that I found myself changing my mind about billies. They’re not so bad. They’re not so scary. And the weirdest thing of all – I kind of like the way they smell. Strange, I know.
So suddenly, we started thinking of keeping our own billy. After all, with five Anglo Nubian nannies, that’s a lot of trips in the car. A nanny will announce that she’s in season by wagging her tail and bleating loudly one morning when you go out to feed. This happy occurrence may only last the day – so you have to run back into the house like mad, cancel all of your appointments, phone the person who owns the billy, cross your fingers that they’re home, beg them to let you come that very day, load the bawling, recalcitrant goat into the trailer, and set off cross country, praying that the sat nav doesn’t misdirect you into any cul-de-sacs where you will be trapped forever.
Suddenly, keeping our own billy was sounding better and better.
And then Rich kept looking at these two Saanen billies for sale on a website. He just liked the look of them, he said. And then he announced his intention to expand the Saanen part of the herd because, as he says, “If Glenda had fingers, she would milk herself.” Glenda, our Saanen, is without a doubt the most reliable, placid creature in existence.
Anyhow, all of this added up to the fact that last Friday, we found ourselves in the car, trailer hitched behind, driving three hours up into North Wales to go and pick up this Saanen billy. He’s a handsome thing, with a majestic beard and a winning smile. Rich dubbed him Snowden, both for his white coat and the famous mountain in North Wales by the same name.
Snowden was duly installed in the goat barn. And now, we figure, we just need one more billy. An Anglo Nubian this time. And we’ve heard of one for sale in Cambridge, just five hours away. Hmmm….