Sama Hoole@SamaHoole
The goats are gone.
Not all of them. There's about 95,000 left in the UK. Mostly hobbyists. A few smallholders. The odd appearance on a children's TV show.
But once upon a time, this island was crawling with them.
Wales had them. Scotland had them. Ireland by the boatload. The medieval peasant kept one in the back garden the way people now keep a Roomba: because it did a job, it cost nothing to run, and it tidied up the inputs.
Goat milk. Goat cheese. Goat hair for rope. Goat skin for parchment, on which most of British law was written. Goat tallow for candles, by which most of British law was read.
You could keep one on a quarter-acre. You could tie one to a fence. You could feed it the brambles and the nettles and the bits of hedge nobody else wanted, and it would give you food and clothing and light in return.
Goats kept the poor alive for a thousand years.
Then the enclosures took away the land you could keep one on. The factories took away the people who would have kept one. The supermarket took away the local economy that would have bought the cheese. The subsidies got written for cattle and sheep, and the goat got demoted to a punchline and a face on a tea towel.
Meanwhile, our hillsides are quietly being swallowed by bramble, gorse, blackthorn, and rhododendron. Invasive scrub that nothing else will eat.
The kind of scrub a goat would clear in a fortnight.
Without being asked.
Without being paid.
Without a planning application.
You don't have a brush management problem.
You have a missing goat problem.
And nobody can quite remember when we stopped having them.
