The Library of Work and Play: Outdoor WorkMiller, Mary Rogers
Philosophy
The Library of Work and Play: Outdoor Work
Miller, Mary Rogers
Agriculture -- Juvenile literature
The comic papers may be right about some things, but they are wrong
about goats. A diet of newspapers and tin cans will not keep a
goat healthy nor produce a salable fleece of fine mohair. Angoras
like common goats are browsers, not grazers like sheep. They eat
coarse vegetation such as weedy growths and the twigs and leaves of
underbrush, rather than grass. Besides this, particularly in winter,
they should have other food. Leaves, table scraps like potato and fruit
parings, turnips and other roots, and cabbage are all acceptable if
clean. Parings and roots should be washed; if you expect goats to eat
swill you deserve to be disappointed. Dirty carrots, rotten apples,
sour or mouldy refuse do not tempt a self-respecting pig; much less
an Angora. Oats in the sheaf are very good fodder for them. Grain is
not required if clover hay, alfalfa, or cowpea stubble is plentiful.
Too much grain makes a lazy goat and a lazy goat will not produce a
handsome fleece. Bran may be fed for a change, and a little cotton seed
or corn may be given, but sparingly. Leaves or other coarse food should
be given plentifully at night, as Angoras relish a midnight lunch
beside their three square meals a day.
A supply of rock salt should be kept where goats can get it whenever
they want it. If it is given only at long intervals they may
over-indulge. Water should be warmed slightly in winter if practicable.
SHELTER AND ENCLOSURE
Hardy as they are, goats cannot stand exposure to storms. They abhor
wet. Cold rain or sleet storms are really dangerous to their health.
Goats will go the long way round every time rather than get into mud.
Mud is very bad for the fleece, too. Buyers refuse to pay for dirt.
Goat shelters should be dry, but they need not be tight except
overhead. In fact many goats die of suffocation when huddled in close
quarters. If the roof is just high enough from the floor for goats to
go under, it can be open all round except perhaps on the side where the
prevailing wind and storms would beat in.
No other animals should be quartered with goats. Experience shows this.
Goats prefer hard beds. Chaff or straw enough to absorb the liquid
manure is all that should be put on the floor. Trees are the best shade
from the hot sun, but if none are growing in the goats' pasture other
shelter should be provided.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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