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Goat Rental – Hire Goats

hiregoats.com

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Re: Goat Rental – Hire Goats

#81

Post by withinboredom »

KingMob wrote: post #73
mingusrude wrote: post #55

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.

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.

Re: Goat Rental – Hire Goats

#83

Post by k_sze »

progre wrote: post #25
markdown wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They will eat all the grass and then shrubs and then small bushes and trees including stripping all the bark. Not animals you want around flora you care about.

Yep, my neighbours keeps goats next to my propery, they escape once in a while. They go directly to the soft greens in my garden. When the fences hold they eat the area clean by type as you say. First the grass, then the leves of the small trees, then the bark (killing the small trees). Only when there is nothing else left will they eat the nettles.

I'm not familiar with goats. But this got me thinking: why would the goats even do that? Are they not well-fed? Are they hungry all the time? Do goats eat and poop 24/7 if left unchecked?

Re: Goat Rental – Hire Goats

#84

Post by d_rc »

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 low hanging branches of pear trees. No worries, I was planning to cut those anyways. After few weeks of not paying that much attention in the evenings, bottom third of all our ~12 trees were gone, she got into salads, potatoes, zucchini, pumpkins, peppers and cucumbers, all nettle was done, and she started checking out tomatoes (which seemed that she is really really not into at first). I am building a new goat house with it's own separate "backyard" with weeds that she won't be able to escape. :)

Re: Goat Rental – Hire Goats

#85

Post by Xylakant »

AndyMcConachie wrote: post #77

The city of Rotterdam has sheep that are owned by the city and shepherded by a city employee. https://www.rotterdam.nl/wonen-leven/grazers/ I'm kind of surprised someone would use goats for this purpose instead of sheep. Sheep are dumb, docile and easy to manage. Goats are impossible to manage.

Goats and sheep have different grazing behavior. Sheep are great for grasses, but goats will happily eat everything- shrubs, grass, name it.

Re: Goat Rental – Hire Goats

#86

Post by mtlmtlmtlmtl »

mingusrude wrote: post #55

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…

What kind of people adopt a pet, and then release it into the wild? People doing this with cats is one of the reasons stray cats are such a big problem in many places. People dumping cat litters in the woods and what not. And rabbits can be an ecological menace too if allowed to multiply, which they do like rabbits.

Re: Goat Rental – Hire Goats

#87

Post by probably_wrong »

guiambros wrote: post #49

Ha, this reminded me of a similar service: goat rental for videoconferences [1] :). It was a hit during the pandemic, with everyone scrambling to combat screen fatigue in creative ways. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32435090

I visited the goat rental page and got a picture of an Alpaca. I want my money back.

Re: Goat Rental – Hire Goats

#88

Post by omnibrain »

At my former working place we had a freelance consultant on retainer who looked into cutting his hours down for health reasons and thus explored new ventures. Because he already had a few sheep he decided to offer sheep rentals as a "biological" lawn cutter.

But there were 2 problems: Sheep can be somewhat picky eaters, so they let some grass stand. But the bigger problem was, that while his prospective customers liked the idea of having their lawn cut "biologically", they pretty much did not like the sheep droppings the sheep left behind in practice.

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