Wow, Thanks Bob
I must say, I appreciate the time you took to share all of that in such a great narrative. We have 3 kids, all born last February/March. 2 are twins, and they do stick together. The third is the odd goat out. I do worry sometimes about them bullying him. One thing I think I am seeing is overly aggressive behavior in the odd goat. He has gotten so accustomed to being butted and shoved that, for example, when I have a bowl of minerals and one of the other guys comes to eat them, he will start making his muffled angry noises and horn them. They all eat from the same bowl, in my hand, without fighting over it, and he knows it. He also knows, as they all do, that any fighting around people is not tolerated. I know my partner, Amy, worries more than I do that they are more aggressive and dangerous to each other than is normal. They are also still intact at the moment.
Romeo, the odd goat (and Amy doesn't like it when I say this) is the spoiled goat. I used to joke that giving him a name like Romeo was screaming "spoil this goat". I think of it like a rescue dog. Someone gets a rescue dog that was mistreated in some way, they feel bad and sorry for it, go out of their way to avoid any sort of dominance or reprimand, and the dog develops new behavioral problems and gets sent back to the shelter. Romeo gets extra attention to make sure he is getting enough food or whatever, and it seems like the right thing to do since the other two dominate, but that is also normal goat herd dominance, so who knows.
Wicket is our dominant pen goat, Romeo the least dominant, and Teddy just wants to eat. Walking in the pasture and on the trail, Romeo is lead goat, Wicket is the middle goat, and Teddy takes up the rear... and just wants to eat.
They all like to engage in "Epic Battles" now and then. However, there was one, between the two brothers, worth describing. It was late summer, and I noticed they were fighting in the pen. I noticed several times before I decided it was going on for an awful long time. I went out and saw they were breathing very heavily, and they would just lock horns and catch their breath, like two boxers hugging. I started hosing them to break them up. It got to the point I was blasting them in the face with the hose and they just took it. I used that opportunity to hose them down all over to wash off some of the goat funk. They finally just worked it out on their own, I guess.
When we were deciding on our goats, I wanted Teddy and Wicket (brothers) for many reasons. Amy wanted Romeo because she spent our first visit holding him under a heat lamp all day while I was out with all the other goats. On our second visit two weeks later, he came running up right to her, so that was that. So the discussion was that we get only two goats so we could handle them. I am from a Scouting background, and I may take the whole "be prepared" thing to an extreme, so I thought three goats... one for each of us to carry what we need, and then a third to carry everything that some day we may very well need, or not, much of it for scenarios that I hope never happen.
My point is that I wish, in all the reading I did on the packgoat groups, I had noticed all the advice about not getting an odd number. It is so apparent in Romeos love of my dog, Tucker, that he would have benefited from having another goat. Unfortunately, Tucker isn't the most affectionate dog with the goats, unless they are all too hot and tired from a hike. He is a run and play dog, and also is very dominant, so the idea of allowing another animal to lay on or near him in any way that could be construed as domination, repulses him. So poor Romeo has to wait until the dog is too tired and sprawled out to care, which doesn't happen very often, and then he sneaks over and slides in next to him. He also tries to treat the dog like a goat, as in head butting, so I can't let them get too near each other most of the time.
Anyway, my long narrative should come to an end. I have discussed a 4th goat with Amy, but her sense of responsibility keeps leaning towards the fact that we are scrambling to teach the three we have, still need to get them fixed, and need to make their pen bigger to accommodate their spring growth as soon as the ground thaws enough to get a t-post in. I think she is right. I have also discussed getting an older goat or two, mostly because John Mionczynski often refers to training young goats by getting them in a pack string with older trained goats. Also, because my back is fused most of the way up, every hike that I put a pack on my back is a little bit more damage that will haunt me for the rest of my life.
So thank you, again, for taking all of your experiences and laying them out for us to help in similar dilemmas. You obviously have put a great deal of effort into really watching and interpreting what is going on with your goats.
Gregg
(in Pinedale, Wyoming, fyi wyowinds)
I forgot to add the comment to the photo, but Romeo is the black goat coming in from up high, and Wicket is the one about to get schooled.