NABLOPOMO – Speed Blogging for Farmers – Sheep v Goats

Today’s NABLOPOMO challenge is to write the whole post in ten minutes.Perfect! I am running behind and only have a few minutes to get this done. So, how about a quick handy dandy guide to how to tell apart the sheep from the goats?

Goats and sheep are similar in many ways – cloven hooves at one end and a noise that sounds a bit like ‘maaaaahhhhh.’ Though, I think goats might be a bit more nasal and whiny than their sheepy cousins. You can milk both creatures, eat both creatures, and, if you have cashmere goats as we do, you can make sweaters from their winter coats, too (though, you use the shorn fleece from the sheep and the carefully combed out and collected under-fluff from the goats).

Goats are more likely to climb over their fences to escape, sheep will get down on their knees and force their way under. Goats are the ones with beards and sheep are the ones with long, floppy tails. On most farms you won’t see those long tails because they are docked when the lambs are very young, but left unaltered, they are so long they nearly reach the ground. Goat tails are short and perky and tend to stand straight up.

At the nose end, the upper lips of goats are divided, whereas sheep lips are one continuous line. Goats tend to be browsers, nibbling on bushes, brambles, and bark (though they will certainly eat grass, too, particularly if there isn’t anything else). Sheep are grazers and will eat away at pasture until they reach bare ground. Rotating them onto fresh pasture before that happens gives the grass a chance to recover and helps reduce parasite loads (more on rotational grazing strategies on a day when I have more than ten minutes).

Goats make fantastic brush-clearers. Their favourite treats are prickly blackberries!

Goats would be the devious ones, pushy and greedy and quite fearless. Sheep tend to be more skittish, bunching together or fleeing wildly when threatened. My dogs, having been slammed into the side of the barn with a nasty head but once or twice after making faces at a goat are terrified of the caprines. The sheep, on the other hand, are terrified of the dogs.

Combing out the raw cashmere is one of the more tedious and time-consuming jobs to be done in the spring.

Ding! Ding! Ding! My ten minutes are up!

No time to do the second part of the assignment (how do you feel about writing under such a tight deadline?). I’m breathing too hard and my fingers are quivering too much to type another word!