Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: Large animal policies

[John Beutler (jabeutler]

True, the scale for goats is more reasonable - a single cow gives a lot of 
milk and requires a lot of pasture.  In this case, a goat or two was more 
trouble than anyone wanted to take on - in my experience as a one-time 
neighbor of goats, is it's like having perpetual teenagers, with all the 
mischief that they get into.  Also, it's a matter of taste, to some extent, 
since folks don't always care for goat milk.  (Feta, on the other hand, is 
wonderful.)  One of the things our cow-owning friends have been doing is 
making several sorts of cheese.  They also have a breed of cow that's 
relatively small.

We DID have a couple of very young and small white (goat) kids who 
mysteriously appeared last year on the property early one Saturday 
morning.  People were wondering if they were hallucinating.  Must have 
hooped off a truck or something.  They were leashed (!) and eventually 
returned to the rightful owners a few miles away, once we figured out who 
that was.

Cheers

JAB

At 12:45 PM 2/2/2008 -0400, you wrote:

> What a shame that the family couldn't have tried a neat little dairy
> goat to provide fresh milk and tidy droppings in very little space.
> Two goats bred to overlap lactations can supply a gallon or two of
> milk per day.  The mature males are undesirerable in close quarters,
> but they need only visit once a year.  Now, if one will not consider
> goats' milk as a substitute for cows' milk, my suggestion is
> useless.  I have kept goats for decades and can promise that they
> will try the most patient person when it comes to confining the
> clever beasts.  Nonetheless, they are perhaps more appropriate scale
> for your neighbourhood and delightful, productive, compact
> companions.  At a bale/week of good hay, they require much less
> storage space to feed for a winter than a horse or cow.
>
> Kathryn Belzer
> www.chaswoodcohousing.ca
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John Beutler
Liberty Village, MD
jabeutler [at] comcast.net
http://www.libertyvillage.com/