Personalities on the Plate by Barbara J. King

Author:Barbara J. King [King, Barbara J.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-226-19521-6
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2017-02-14T05:00:00+00:00

Goat moods

Unlike chickens, cows, and pigs, goats aren’t regularly kept at factory farms. Even so, they don’t always escape abuse and neglect. Buttercups Sanctuary, one of the locations Briefer has used to conduct her behavior experiments, teems with goats, about 135 of them. It’s the sole registered sanctuary in the UK given over wholly to care of goats. On tours days, brown, black, white, and multicolored faces peer out as some goats boldly greet and seek contact with guests—like Prince did at Farm Sanctuary in California—while others hang back. This variation is familiar to goat-raisers. When the novelist Brad Kessler left New York City for the farming life in Vermont, he began goat dairying and soon spent his days surrounded by does Hannah and Lizzie, kids Pie, Nisa, Penny, and Eustace Tilley, and more. In some ways, the goats seemed to him of one mind: they liked routine, not novelty; during milking, they visibly responded to calmness on Kessler’s part with calmness of their own. Lizzie, though, stood out. She was “the perfect milker and mother and protector of the herd who policed the barnyard at night and took up the rear when grazing.”

When visitors came to the farm to purchase two kids—Lizzie’s two young daughters—the herd crowded around. Lizzie, who had been ill, didn’t join in, staying on a hill apart from the others. Then one of the kids called up the hill to her mother. When Lizzie called back, the kid went up and pressed her face against her mother. Soon the twins were placed in their new owners’ truck. At this point, Lizzie did descend the hill and called to her daughters. The truck pulled away. Of all the goats, Lizzie alone remained standing there for a full hour. She stared down the driveway, Kessler writes, “high wind in her hair, looking at the place where her daughters last had been.”

The more time Kessler spent with goats, he says, the more “complex and wondrous” seemed their emotional lives. Yet he also knows that bucklings—the boy goats—are destined to become food, more often than are the doelings. “Young, milk-fed capretto is meltingly tender,” he writes. “Older kids are barbecued or spitted and roasted whole, and still older ones braised, stewed, jerked, or curried.” Those goat stews so savored in Los Angeles and across the world come from somewhere, after all. At Harley Farms in California, where I watched the protector llama stride among the goats, and saw the good life the milked females have, no males are present. The reason for their absence is clear.

My struggle to fathom how these dual commentaries of Kessler’s can coexist—his recognition of wondrous goat emotions alongside his savoring of roasted kids—no doubt seems hopelessly sentimental to farmers. Just as with chickens, goats are routinely kept around the world on small farms, where they are known as individuals and may be slaughtered for the family table. Vegetarians and vegans wouldn’t eat Kessler’s goats no matter how humanely they had been raised. As I

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