Last Friday there was a report of a couple of escaped goats in Stanford hiding in someone’s garden. Today it looks like they have escaped again and are currently gambolling about in Joyces Road. Maybe they fancied playing MetroX with us last night, but if so, someone should tell them that at the moment boardGOATS is meeting online so they can join in from wherever they are as long as they can get a decent inter-goat connection…
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| – Image from facebook.com |
Back in October, boardGOATS celebrated our 8th birthday. We always have a bit of a party and play Crappy Birthday, but the current situation meant that this year it had to be held online. So, to make it a bit more memorable, we had a special guest: Elizabeth from Cronkshaw Fold Farm. As well as entertaining people with yoga, Elizabeth and her friends from Rossendale in Lancashire are TV stars from The Great Staycation.
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| – Image from cronkshawfoldfarm.co.uk |
Back in April, when everyone was stuck at home and so many meetings moved online, Cronkshaw‘s Chief Goat-Wrangler, Dot McCarthy, came up with the idea of hiring out members of the flock to “butt in” on conference calls. What started off as a joke has now resulted in thousands of calls, all over the world, earning over £50,000. When so many people have been furloughed, this has enabled the farm to keep on two employees full-time. And the goats have brought a little bit of much needed fun into so many people’s lives; certainly, Elizabeth made a valued contribution to our birthday celebrations.
Goats who fight are likely to end up looking silly…
| – From twitter.com |
Just a few seconds of baby goats playing can really brighten up a grey December day…
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| – From RexChapman on twitter.com |
The Icelandic Goat or “settlement goat”, is an ancient breed of domestic goat thought to be of Norwegian origin and dating back to the settlement of Iceland over a thousand years ago. Around a hundred years ago, numbers began to dwindle and the breed was on the verge of extinction. Although numbers fluctuated, by the end of the twentieth century, numbers were in what appeared to be terminal decline.
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| – Image from indiegogo.com |
That was until Jóhanna Bergmann Þorvaldsdóttir made it her mission to save them, pretty much single handedly. She left her job as a nurse, and began breeding goats. Although the income was small, the flock grew to several hundred. However, following Iceland’s financial collapse, the family farm of Háafell in Borgarbyggðthe, was at risk of foreclosure. As a last ditch effort to save the flock, the family launched a crowdfunding campaign. Partly thanks to a starring appearance in the fourth series of Game of Thrones, nearly £90,000 was raised to keep the dragon from the door.
| – Video by Shinonoiru on youtube.com |
So the story has a happy ending: the farm is now thriving with sales of milk, cheese and meat and the media flock to see the flock and report the tale. And the numbers of Icelandic Goats have increased from less than a hundred in 1962, to nearly 1,500 today. Even Casanova, the goat that was snatched by Drogon the Dragon, lived to tell the tale.
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| – Image by Art Bicnick |
Obviously, goats are very lovely, but they can be useful as well as ornamental. The flock that visit annually visit the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) in California are essential and have averted a number of crises. In what has become a nice seasonal tradition, every year, the LBNL rent the herd from “Goats R Us”, to eat the grass and reduce the wildfire risk around the laboratory; watching their arrival is quite spectacular…
| – Video by Berkeley Lab on youtube.com |
What is it about Welsh goats causing havoc?!?! First, it was a couple of mischievous Welsh goats playing on roofs, and now it is a whole flock stopping traffic and eating garden shrubs. The herd of Kashmiri goats, were originally a gift from Queen Victoria to local landowner Lord Mostyn but are now regarded as wild and life in the hills around Llandudno.
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| – Image by George Good, from dailypost.co.uk |
They often venture down from the hills when the weather is bad, but Storm Gareth has driven them much further into town than usual.
| – From twitter.com |
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