Goats’ inhumanity to goats

My donkeys share a 300-year-old barn with a tribe of goats.

That’s what a group of goats is called. It’s an odd descriptive — you’d think it would be a herd — but it’s not as odd as a murder of crows or a clowder of cats.

Anyway, a few days ago, I walked in to see this:

Cute, right?

But although goats love to climb, the one in the window wasn’t playing.

She was being bullied by the others and climbed up on the ledge to get away, but then found there was nowhere to go. (Many of us still in quarantine right now can relate.)

Seeing this, and the constant delivery of prey to the baby owls on the barred owl live web cam, and you feel deeply the sharpest divide between humans and beasts, that of conscience.

Even guilty-looking dogs probably don’t feel guilt, researchers say. Their long faces are a response to our reaction to their bad behavior, not remorse over eating the whole turkey or chewing our shoes.

And goats definitely don’t feel bad about bullying a member of their tribe, or abandoning their loyal fans of 20 years for the Tampa Bay Bucs.

Just sayin’.

8 thoughts on “Goats’ inhumanity to goats”

  3. The goat in the foreground cracks me up. Looks like a customer who has settled in for the night at a bar and is energized to order his sixth shot and pick his next fight. The goat he ran off has dried her tears and is on the windowsill because she has finished plotting her revenge. She will exit the window, go to the parking lot, and slash that goat’s tires. No, wait, she’s a goat, she will chew that goat’s tires to shreds. The morning after Drunk Goat gets home, his wife will find the telltale lipstick on the hubcaps, and things will get ugly. Drunk Goat will not be allowed out to go to Ye Olde Three Hundred House Bar & Grille for months. Meanwhile, the two female goats will get to know each other at a Mahjong club and become fast friends. The End.

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