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Goat Rental – Hire Goats

hiregoats.com

251–260 of 280 posts

Re: Goat Rental – Hire Goats

#251
post #73

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.

Letting them free will likely get them eaten anyway, probably less humanly since they’ll still be alive while they are eaten. Or run over. These are domesticated rabbits, not wild ones.

My experience is that you don't let a rabbit go... you just stop trying to track the little lagomorph down after it chews through or digs under the fence for the third time.

Rabbits are good as prey, great as pests, bad as pets.

Re: Goat Rental – Hire Goats

#252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rabbits are incredibly destructive of many environments. Have a look at New Zealand.

Then don't breed them, sell them as pets, then lie to parents and kill and eat them. Seems like an easy solution..

This is how I’ve always behaved, yet the problem remains.

Re: Goat Rental – Hire Goats

#253
post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Goats' honey just ain't that good...

Bee milk is extremely spicy, but each bee can only be milked once and doesn't produce very much.

You can harvest venom and it’s worth quite a lot.

It does seem a bit like bee torture though.

Re: Goat Rental – Hire Goats

#254
post #229
post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Den Bock zum Gärtner machen

"Pukki kaalimaan vartijana" for the Finnish equivalent (goat guarding the cabbage patch)

We have “fox guarding the henhouse” which is closer in tone to the Finnish phrase perhaps than the German one.

Re: Goat Rental – Hire Goats

#255
post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> is not just incompetent, but where he will actually cause damage - for instance because he has ulterior motives. That made me think it was more. And anyway, as much as the fox does with chickens, the goat knows it will set about to kill and eat plants. There's no real reason to call the fox knowingly malicious and the goat not.

>There's no real reason to call the fox knowingly malicious and the goat not. I think we imagine foxes to have a level of cunning that a placid goat lacks.

While the fox features in a larger variety of animistic stories, the goat is not without its own set of parables.

Re: Goat Rental – Hire Goats

#256
post #232
post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you mean the goat is eating the tomato fruit, or the tomato leaves? The latter are toxic to (AIUI) all monogastrics, same as potatoes and other Solanum family plants - you may want to reign that behaviour in, assuming the animals are still alive.

Goats are ruminants.

> Ruminants [...] are able to acquire nutrients from plant-based food by fermenting it in a specialized stomach prior to digestion [...] The word "ruminant" comes from the Latin ruminare, which means "to chew over again".

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruminant

TIL: So that's from where the word "ruminate" comes :-)

Re: Goat Rental – Hire Goats

#257

My wife and I hired goats from a gentleman on Nextdoor to help clear our backyard in our newly purchased home (like ~10000sqft of overgrowth) - he dropped off 7 goats, and they performed admirably, were extremely calm and well behaved until they ran out of food, at which point they turn into food-hunting, petulant children. If you do this, make sure to get only as many as you need!

> they turn into food-hunting, petulant children

What more previously do they do then? (When in petulant children mode)

Re: Goat Rental – Hire Goats

#258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is the emphasis of what will cause the damage more about the incompetence, or about more purposeful nefarity from the eg. ulterior motives?

I think most goats don't have sinister ulterior motives! Except for one goat but probably that's not the one in your garden Meaning, I'm guessing it's about happy incompetence and thoughtlessness?

Goats' motivations are mostly to eat tasty tree bark and (some) other plants. Hardly incompetent or thoughtless, they're relentless if not contained.

I have three, and the only incompetence at play is when I accidentally don't contain them well enough. From my last event: https://fractaldragon.net/posts/2022-05-09_bloody_goats.html

Re: Goat Rental – Hire Goats

#259
post #149
post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> with no chance of the goat escaping Bold assumption there. As they say, "if it doesn't hold water it won't hold a goat."

My town stopped its annual “goats clear the park” setup because one goat would consistently escape and wreak havoc on traffic. Pretty solid enclosure, too

An electric fence goes a long way, and can be portable. Works great as long as you remember to close the gate. cough

Re: Goat Rental – Hire Goats

#260
post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As long as extracting whatever food there is is less effort than circumventing the fence the goat will remain...

I think modeling a goat as a rational agent is also pretty bold :-)

You'd think so... but yeah, they have their own sort of smarts. Mine are very adept at reaching or finding tasty plants. One was less bright about plants on the other side of a fence that her horns fit through, one way. I had to rescue her about eight times, until the horns were long enough to not go through the fence wire.
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