You know, it just goes to show that with goats, you kind of need to always have an 'up and coming' goat to replace any that randomly die like that. They just don't seem to reach old age as often as they should. They also suffer from a too-early old age. With a dog, a replacement puppy is more or less in place at 9 months or so, but a goat or horse takes 4 years before they're ready to carry weight... Well. Its just a good excuse to have too many goats!
I have a mixed horn/no horn herd. Here's how it works:
The boss goat is Victoria, a hornless female. She is boss purely because of attitude and her ability to bite ears and her incredible muscle strength and energy. Shelby is younger but larger and also has no horns. He is too chill to want to fight much. Amelia is a female that avoids fights, but at first picked on the new goat--- Bacchus is a baby and has fantastic horns. He surely will become boss eventually. He's rather mellow really, but has a bit of fighting pep in him even so, and he knows what those horns are for. While he stands as tall as the boss female, he avoids her at all times, despite his horns. Surely this will change. Woodstock is a baby boer/alpine mix and has those useless boer horns. He has a sheep-lilke harmless personality that is so submissive that I don't even allow anyone to punish him when he's bad-- He just takes it too well. So other than the boss female and horned baby, they're too mellow to fight at all.
So in the end I have 1 goat with horns and I think that'll work out great. He can be boss someday and he's not very mean. He wont have any other horned goats that want to head-butt with him so hopefully he's wont pick up the habit. If I got another horned goat, I think I'd have to deal with a lot more rowdy fighting. In retrospect I wish all of my goats had horns just for the awesome look. Hornless sure is nice for transport and maintenance though.
In short I think you'd be OK getting a horned goat if he's mellow enough and you plan on only having one with horns. You will be coronating him king, though. Good luck finding a packer thats ready to go. I've seen some nice ones come up this year. I'm looking for one myself, since only the boss female, who is pretty small, is old enough to carry weight.
I hope you can find a new hiking buddy soon.
