Misty (with the lampshade) & Holly. But later on it may be Misty & Vesla or Vesla & Holly.
The hierarchy never changes, I don’t know what’s resolved by this ritual
or if it’s just practice, like a fire drill.
“In case something happens, we’ll know what to do”.
Practice, practice, practice. On and on, whenever there’s a spare moment.
Nothing ever does happen, though.
A Bad Guide 
I love them! The girls and the pictures, specially the last one.
Oh that’s lucky, I only added the last one at the last moment.
A great sequence.
I imagined a caption for the great concluding shot:
“And a good thing, too!”
It was pointed out here, from the forward area of the command module, that some of the butting looks quite good-natured, one might almost say affectionate.
(In fact, so great are the magnetic attractions of these wild and woolly media superstars that in the traffic to get a first look at this post, I was actually butted out of the way!)
Oh, that’s quite right, it’s all good-natured and affectionate butting. I ought to have mentioned that, I’m glad it’s apparent from the pictures.
I was thinking of that Talking Heads’ song “Heaven is a place where nothing ever happens”. I’ve been singing it to myself for some days now. It’s about a NY nightclub called Heaven, but it’s also a good point to ponder, I thought.
Yes. I would prefer Norway goat heaven to New York nightclub heaven, however.
And they are so beautiful. They never stop being beautiful. Even in lampshades.
They have charm, your goats.
Yes. They always seem to me to have very kind eyes.
So cute!
Is it like dogs play-fighting? I’ve taken loads of photos of my dog having a grand time playing with her dog friends, but then I check out the results and they look as if they are about to rip each other apart. It’s doesn’t look like “Riley and Avava having fun in the yard.”
The dogs have much faster and seemingly more unpredictable movements than the goats. The goat thing is VERY slow and ritualized, more like sumo wrestling than soccer tackling, though with both kinds of animal the fight seems to be won by who can psyche out their opponent rather than who’s the best fighter.
sumo wrestling
My darlings!! =)
So they butt each other and… how do you (they) know “who wins”? Does the vanquished show subordination (or have to forfeit the tastiest leaves)?
The jumping up in the air bit is so charming! It’s very hard to take the butting serious from the pictures.
When you say “in case something happens” and “nothing ever does happen” — have they never had occasion to drive off an intruder? A dog, for example, or somebody who has come to cut down trees? Would they use those same butting skills in such an emergency?
With training, could they aspire to this?
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/wildlife/8819557/Antelope-crashes-into-mountain-biker-during-race.html
You’d be better off trying to train a moose-or-elk to do that. Our goats have no aspirations to run towards anything except what THEY regard as food.
Ø, I think their first instinct is to run away, but if they were cornered they’d butt. Luckily their horns and wool-inflated size make them look intimidating to dogs so they don’t get beaten up. But I just took them for a walk and they were totally spooked the whole way, looking around anxiously & hesitating. They had no time to eat, which was why I’d taken them. I think they might have been frightened recently by a dog (or badger, my wife says).
mab, no, the vanquished one doesn’t roll over like a dog does, but as you say, she has to give up first choice of leaves. Vesla’s lost so many times that she always hangs back until the others have taken the best stuff and moved on. However, I don’t think the butting hurts much, if at all, most of the time; it’s a ritual. I’ll take back what I said before; it must just be the stronger one who wins. One strategy is that one forward-looking goat will take the higher ground (a treestump, hillside or rock) and push her opponent backwards. That always works, at least until the opponent makes the same move in retaliation.
Julia, they move slowly like sumo wrestlers, but they have very quick movements when they butt. They don’t really look like sumo wrestlers, for one thing their heads are so large in proportion to their body – that’s also why they’re so easy to distinguish from dogs, I think. Dogs have quite small heads.
Fascinating. You must write “The Secret Lives of Goats.” It would be a bestseller.
They’d sue me. I might get away with ‘their story as told to’ if I split the money four ways.
Payment in tasty leaves? You’d definitely come out ahead…
Prize-winning Colorado goat in doping row
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/15318899
You would never do anything like that, would you?
the family was shocked
Shocked, shocked. Well, I think that goat looks excessively muscular.