My daughter did some work on Holly and Misty yesterday. She’s planning to finish it today. She’s very busy with school at the moment. Unlike my Australian forebears who could have done them both in five minutes, each goat takes us several hours to shear.
After she’d finished they looked pretty odd, but they seemed pleased to be less warmly dressed.
We had seen a beautiful afghan hound earlier in the day, and I think that may have been the look that the hairdresser was trying for:
Holly as a scary monster:
It’s two weeks since Vesla was sheared. She’s looking better now her coat has grown out a little bit. Here she is about to …
… butt Holly:
She’s a good little runner:
A Bad Guide 
Interesting look! Like some of the silly trimmed poodles in my park.
Love the last photo!
“Click go the shears, boys, click click click,
Wide is his blow and his hand moves quick,
The ringer looks around and is beaten by a blow,
And curses the old snagger with the bare belly Joe.”
As your Australian forebears sang …
Thanks, mab.
Thanks, Canehan. I never knew the words before now.
That’s it. I’m officially in love with your goats. Which is entirely unexpected because my early experience as a goatherd taught me to dislike them fairly intensely.
Do you use the old-fashioned hand clippers or a more modern electric buzz cutter? A friend and I went to see some sheep being sheared last weekend. One variety (a black Wensleydale Longwool, not pictured by either of us) is, apparently, more rare than a giant panda. She was sheared with hand clippers. It looked like hard work on the hands, never mind the physical effort required to haul the sheep around and get to the more out-of-the-way crannies and nooks.
The goats I herded as a youth were brainless bloody-minded milkers and their death-wish kids. One of the adults drank her own milk and had to wear a heavy collar bearing enormous metal spikes more than a foot long to prevent her self-nourishing in this way. It made dealing with them even more hazardous than with horns alone.
Yours look much better adjusted creatures :-)
Do running goat gaits vary (by breed, individual, mood, …)?
All three. Vesla’s a slightly different breed from the other two; she’s smaller, and seems to be the only one capable of the galloping gait in the bottom picture. I’m not sure she trots, which the other two do. Mood is important: if they’re particularly happy they’ll do a quick sideways dance with their head twisting back and forth to either side. It’s hard to get a picture of it. Their posture is expressive too. When Misty’s worried there might be a predator hiding nearby, her head goes downwards and forward.
rr, thanks.
I’m ashamed to say we’ve been using scissors up until recently. It took forever. Then one day I bought myself some electric hair clippers only to find they cut way too short for my taste, so we tried them on the goats and it works quite well and much faster.
I loved seeing your sheep sheering pictures. Here is a page of some magnificent-looking wensleydale longwool sheep, not one of them black. I suppose I can reverse the images in photoshop. Sorry about your goats. They are very smart animals, as are sheep, and like most smart creatures they can be totally bloody-minded when they want to be. Ours all have very different personalities. They might benefit from some psychotherapy, but then who wouldn’t?
I like your sock picture at your blog. It looks very hard.
Nigerian Dwarf Goat.
Maximum 22″ at the withers, that must be about the size of Vesla. I do wish people wouldn’t remove their horns.
AJP, thank you for calling attention to the sock, and IT, for posting it. A work of art! I looked up the instructions and WOW!
Yes, a work of art. “IT” is really lower-case “RR”. There’s something wrong with the wordpress font (and perhaps my eyesight) that makes it really look like IT.
Actually I first read “rr”, but squinting at it I saw “IT” which I had read on earlier posts. Strange!
The instructions for the sock are practically row by row, so adapting them to a different size would indeed require a lot of math.
And the rows have to be crooked. I don’t know much about knitting, but it looks damn hard. I don’t think Grumbly should start with that!
Our “Goats from All Over” series continues:
For a moment, she was distracted by a goat. “I want a baby goat,” she mused. “I’ll take good care of it.”
–Esther Duflo, quoted in Ian Parker, “The Poverty Lab,” The New Yorker, May 17, 2010, p. 89
(Don’t know how that period got in there between “I” and “want.”)
Oh, I thought it was a speck of dust. Anyway, it’s gone.
I love these Goats from All Over.
There were goats
All around,
But I never heard them bleating,
No, I never heard them at all,
Till there was you…
Indeed, Grumbly, don’t start with those socks. The designer is not only an expert but a real virtuoso. But you are not after making knitted clothing, if I remember right.
Aw, c’mon hat.
“Till there was ewe.”
Oh dear. From the Nurdgaia:-
“Scientists have created the world’s first synthetic life form …The new organism is based on an existing bacterium that causes mastitis in goats”.
You have Australian forebears? :|
Lots. My father & his side are all from NSW and some of my mother’s family are from Queensland.
Where are you from, DG?
Well I’ll be blowed! I’m from Queensland (Sunshine Coast). I think my forebears were more agricultural than pastoral, though.
My great-uncle used to take his entire family to “Surfer’s” every year. It was the only time he would ever leave their property, which was near Goodiwindi.
Dearieme has spent time in Queensland.