188. To those gentlemen who keep rabbits for the use of their family (and a very useful and convenient article they are,) I would observe, that when they find their rabbits die, they may depend on it, that ninety-nine times out of the hundred _starvation_ is the malady. And particularly short feeding of the doe, while, and before she has young ones; that is to say, short feeding of her _at all times_; for, if she be poor, the young ones will be good for nothing. She will _live_ being poor, but she will not, and cannot breed up fine young ones. GOATS AND EWES. 189. In some places where a cow cannot be kept, a goat may. A correspondent points out to me, that a Dorset ewe or two might be kept on a common near a cottage to give milk; and certainly this might be done very well; but I should prefer a goat, which is hardier and much more domestic. When I was in the army, in New Brunswick, where, be it observed, the snow lies on the ground seven months in the year, there were many goats that _belonged to the regiment_, and that went about with it on shipboard and every-where else. Some of them had gone through nearly the whole of the _American War_. We _never fed_ them. In summer they picked about wherever they could find grass; and in winter they lived on cabbage-leaves, turnip-peelings, potatoe-peelings, and other things flung out of the soldiers' rooms and huts. One of these goats belonged to me, and, on an average throughout the year, she gave me more than three half-pints of milk a day. I used to have the kid killed when a few days old; and, for some time, the goat would give nearly or quite, two quarts of milk a day. She was seldom dry more than three weeks in the year. 190. There is one great inconvenience belonging to goats; that is, they bark all young trees that they come near; so that, if they get into a _garden_, they destroy every thing. But there are seldom trees on commons, except such as are too large to be injured by goats; and I can see no reason against keeping a goat where a cow cannot be kept. Nothing is so hardy; nothing is so little nice as to its food. Goats will pick peelings out of the kennel and eat them. They will eat mouldy bread or biscuit; fusty hay, and almost rotten straw; furze-bushes, heath-thistles; and, indeed, what will they not eat, when they will make a hearty meal on _paper_, brown or white, printed on or not printed on, and give milk all the while! They will lie in any dog-hole. They do very well clogged, or stumped out. And, then, they are very _healthy_ things into the bargain, however closely they may be confined. When sea voyages are so stormy as to kill geese, ducks, fowls, and almost pigs, the goats are well and lively; and when a dog of no kind can keep the deck for a minute, a goat will skip about upon it as bold as brass.