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By Marie McNeill
Being raised a city girl, albeit the small city of Hastings, Nebraska, pop. approx 25,000, I wasn’t very familiar with farm animals. It never occurred to me that they, except for horses, would have personalities.
This all changed when my husband got a chance to acquire a goat. His father had raised goats when he was a boy, so apparently he had a real affinity for them. I was a little leery at the prospect of having an animal with horns, but he assured me it would be fine.
My doubts deepened when upon first meeting our little 20-pound Cockapoo, Spats, she instantly butted him so hard he rolled at least a half a dozen time before coming to a stop. This I’m sure hurt Spats’ feelings as he was a super friendly little guy, but he took it in stride.
We weren’t in an area zoned to have farm animals but since we’d recently purchased a horse, a thoroughbred, gelding quarter horse that stood and impressive 17-1/2 hands, we thought the time had come to get a bigger place. We named the horse Cochise. We were having him boarded, but were anxious to have him with us, so we figured it was time to purchase an acreage. We found just what we wanted in Apache Junction….an acre and a quarter and we moved into it as soon as possible. My husband, Don, immediately built corrals and an enclosure for Penny, the goat.
He had made a huge mistake in starting her off on Estrella feed. I believe that is a mixture of alfalfa and molasses. She loved it but after having it she wouldn’t eat anything as mundane as grass. Don and I had a few words over that, and he promised to wean her from the Estrella but he was so busy in his business, he really hadn’t had a chance to.
By this time I had discovered that Penny had quite a lot of personality. She was half Pygmy and half Nubian and loved to use those horns. She could be stubborn and I was always very careful around her, not wanting to be butted and needless to say, Spatsie now kept his distance.
Don and I used to go every Friday to a local eatery that specialized in New England clam chowder. It was excellent. I don’t care for crackers in soup at all, so I started bringing mine home. The first time I fed them to Penny she saw me unwrap the cellophane, and she went wild. After that when I would approach her pen crackling the cellophane cracker wrapper behind my back, she would go happily beserk. She’d put her front hooves on the fence and her little tongue would dart in and out about 100 miles per hour. The naughtiness, stubbornness and her affinity for crackers were what taught me just how much personality these animals could have.
Not too long after moving to the acreage, Don acquired another horse. This one was a beautiful, Arabian mare named Sheena. She was a mere 15-1/2 hands. I found out another interesting point. Even if a horse is a gelding a mare will still be subservient to him. We also found out Cochise could be mean in his efforts to control Sheena. He bit her several times, so Don split the ample corral in half and separated them. I was lunging Sheena one day out in the yard, and Cochise could see her. He kept calling to her and she finally broke free and ran to him. Watching that incredible animal run, mane and tail flying caused a catch in my throat. She was exquisite.
One day Don came home with another goat. He put her in an empty enclosure then came in to tell me the news. He said he’d been driving up in the Goldfield area north of Apache Junction, and had seen a goat tied to a shrub. It was more than 100 degrees, the goat had no shade, water or food. Being an animal lover (more than he loved people) he said his first impulse was to punch the goat’s owner in the nose but instead he offered him $15 for the goat and the man accepted it. Don asked me to come out and look at her, and I was appalled. She had no fat on her and very little flesh. She looked like a goat skeleton that someone had covered with skin. I was near tears. He explained he was going to feed her carefully since too much food at once would make her ill.
Meanwhile, Penny was outraged at this interloper. How dare we bring home another goat! She started bleating and ramming her head into her enclosure and running around acting crazy. We ignored her which made her even madder. She finally tired of banging her head and settled down. A few days later Don staked the new goat, now name Gaby to an area near the pens where we had grass-like weeds growing in and on the sides of a wash that ran through our property. Gaby loved the grass and was so contented eating it….I’m sure thankful to have it. Penny, who had always turned up her nose at grass, went absolutely ballistic over this. She bleated and cried and ran around, so Don staked her out, too….and she began eating grass too. That was hilarious enough, but the first time I took Spatsie out in the back, he saw the goats eating the grass so he approached them and began munching on it too. And me with only one camera that was broken. I called to my husband to come out and see our 3 ‘livestock’ placidly grazing together.
Not too long after that my administrative assistant (read Gal Friday/Guru), Mary, entered a drawing at the local newspaper to win a 25-pound, Thanksgiving turkey. She had envisioned a large, frozen bird ready to thaw and stuff. Not so. She won the drawing and was awarded a live, 25-pound bird, in a cage and on the hoof, beak, feathers and all! She was terribly dismayed as she had an affinity for birds. She had several at her home and could therefore never have slaughtered that bird. She brought it out to our acreage and prevailed upon us to keep her as a pet and not kill her. Not a hard promise to make since neither of us would have relished killing her either.
Don decided she needed a name. Someone, I don’t remember who, decided she should be named Nancy Reagan Kubiak (Mary’s last name) Britt, (our last name); enter Nancy Reagan Kubiak Britt. Apparently someone in the group was comparing the ex-first lady to this admirable bird. The name stuck.
Thanksgiving came and went and Nancy was comfortable in her pen. At one point she was far too comfortable. Don did a double-take one morning when he went out to feed the animals. Nancy’s craw was so huge it was dragging the ground. Her enclosure abutted Penny’s and apparently the goat had taken a liking to the bird and was shoving Estrella pellets through the fence to Nancy. Feeling her engorged craw, Don could feel the tell-take pellets. He had to put a solid board far enough up the fence between the 2 enclosures so Penny couldn’t share her pellets anymore.
All hell broke loose one afternoon when Don came running in the house, breathless. He shouted that Nancy was dead. She had been torn apart by 2 dogs running loose, that had gotten into her pen. Don grabbed a gun and returned to the yard. By that time one of the dogs, desperate to get away had frantically dug a hole under the divider fence…. and into Penny’s pen. Big mistake. She apparently knew her turkey-friend was dead so she charged the hapless dog, butting it with her head, catching him on the horns and tossing him in the air. She chased him around the pen with fire in her eyes. His eyes were filled with the pleading for someone to help him let her go! In desperation, he finally threw himself under the outer fence and fled.
Don shot the other dog which was trying to work its way under the fence into Gaby’s enclosure…. and before I get a landslide of comments criticizing us for killing a dog, over a turkey, bear these facts in mind: (1) Since the day when a 5-year-old child, walking down a public road in Avondale, was attacked and torn apart by a pit bull and a pit bull mix, there was a hastily-enacted law making it against the law for a dog to be off its owner’s property without a leash, whether the propertywas in or out of an incorporated area. There was a lot of outrage expressed in this state over the death of that child. I believe this law now covers the whole state, but I am sure it covers at least Maricopa County; (2) we feared the dogs would attack our other animals (excepting Penny, of course). Horses are extremely vulnerable to attacking dogs, and little Gaby was not completely recovered from her near-starvation and would have probably been killed, had that one dog gotten under the fence…….
That evening, sitting at the kitchen table, Don admitted he felt terrible about the dog, and thought it should be legal to shoot irresponsible owners instead, but alas, that wasn’t an option.
So we had adults grieving over, of all things, a turkey. We’d all had turkey for Thanksgiving, but somehow with Nancy, it was different. We knew her. We’d seen her poking her beak through her enclosure ‘talking’ to us. We’d watched her trot around as turkey do. We’d seem her personality. She was one of our family. Doggone it, we’d miss her!
I don’t know…..maybe you had to be there.
