211–220 of 280 posts
Story time - My dad asked the local school which had a goat if he can borrow it for a weekend. It was to tame his backyard. As the backyard was enclosed with no chance of the goat escaping, we left it by itself. The goat was be extremely hungry and ate everything insight including the roots, leaves and bark. By Monday, the backyard is barren and took months recover. Moral of the story - keep an eye on the goat.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Also, goats deal really well with sloped areas that machines and people struggle with. Where I live they get used a lot on highway embankments.
Electric mowers and brush cutters solved that years ago. They weigh nothing.
(Also, because their method of destruction is eating, they also go for root systems and clear them whole; this is a very important feature in my area, as they’re used to kill blackberry, which does not die if you leave the roots.)
My sister has a small farm and in addition to cows and horses she also has rabbits. Every spring, parents show up to buy a rabbit to have at home. When the deal is done my sister takes the parents aside and tell them that if they plan or feel by the end of the summer that they want to let the rabbit loose, they can return it for free. What she does not tell is that our brother-in-law is a chef and happily makes rabbi…
> If there was ever a win-win situation, this is it. Say what? She lies via omission to the parents, forcing them to make an uninformed choice. Instead of letting a rabbit loose in the wild, they might have sought another home for it, because they didn't want it to die. Your sister's lies mislead them into thinking they can safely return the rabbit.
I looked into this a couple of times for an urban-ish lot with an overgrown backyard. (I don't have a green thumb!). There were several services in my area, including the awesomely-named Rent-a-ruminant. Unfortunately, for smaller lots, it just isn't feasible - the way the pricing is structured, the setup fees get you. They are really for multi-acre lots where they set up significant fencing and leave the goats for s…
Here in Northern Europe they just use GPS-enabled electric collars on the goats, and do literal geofencing with that. Then you don't have any cost of setting up physical fences. Of course you have to accept that the fence position has an inaccuracy 5-6 meters, so it only makes sense for large areas where there is nothing that will kill the goat if it strays a little outside the fence.
Story time - My dad asked the local school which had a goat if he can borrow it for a weekend. It was to tame his backyard. As the backyard was enclosed with no chance of the goat escaping, we left it by itself. The goat was be extremely hungry and ate everything insight including the roots, leaves and bark. By Monday, the backyard is barren and took months recover. Moral of the story - keep an eye on the goat.
In German, there’s an old phrase: “Appointing the goat as gardener”. You use it when somebody is being made responsible for task for which he is not just incompetent, but where he will actually cause damage - for instance because he has ulterior motives.
Another story from a fellow hacker with a backyard goat - It actually starts in a very subtle way. Goats have different tastes and moods, and it's not like they eat everything right away unless the density of a goat per backyard m2 is too high. I started giving mine some free "roaming" time with the chickens every day before the sunset. It looked very innocent - first few days she ate just some weeds, nettle and some…
Apparently they find it super tasty, but it's not vegetarian, so they shouldn't eat it. The chickens get into much less trouble and can roam mostly unsupervised; but we've got a lot of aerial preditors to watch out for.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> If there was ever a win-win situation, this is it. Say what? She lies via omission to the parents, forcing them to make an uninformed choice. Instead of letting a rabbit loose in the wild, they might have sought another home for it, because they didn't want it to die. Your sister's lies mislead them into thinking they can safely return the rabbit.
They can, in fact, safely return the rabbit to the stew pot. They're food. Rabbits. People eat them. It's not better for the rabbit to be turned loose to be mauled to death by a housecat or eaten by a coyote. A shelter is going to euthanize, wasting good meat. This is squeamishness masquerading as morality.
Story time - My dad asked the local school which had a goat if he can borrow it for a weekend. It was to tame his backyard. As the backyard was enclosed with no chance of the goat escaping, we left it by itself. The goat was be extremely hungry and ate everything insight including the roots, leaves and bark. By Monday, the backyard is barren and took months recover. Moral of the story - keep an eye on the goat.
In German, there’s an old phrase: “Appointing the goat as gardener”. You use it when somebody is being made responsible for task for which he is not just incompetent, but where he will actually cause damage - for instance because he has ulterior motives.