thebelmontgoats

Our social medium types for us. We tried voice-to-text but it just came out, “Meeeeeeh! Meh! Meeeh!”

Waking up to your buddies, some good grass hay, sun to layabout in but shade if you want it, and scratches through the fence unless you’re lucky enough to have open days because scratches in-person is better.

Now if you asked what is an urban goat’s perfect date, well that’d be this.

Thanks for the questions. A little of this is answered in another question but we don’t want people to have to jump around, and we love telling the story anyway.

Back in 2010 a local landscape architect spotted two whole square blocks of vacant field on the line between a light industrial area and a residential one. He approached the developer to pitch bringing in goats to clear the brush during summer months.

His secret agenda was that he also was interest in what an urban neighborhood would think about Sudden Goats.

For three summers rented herds came in at which point an adjacent business owner asked if he could just start his own herd there because he’d grown to love the idea but wanted goats there year-round.

That’s the herd that still exists today. The neighborhood of course loved the goats, and people from around Portland would come either for respite or just the whimsy of it. When the land got closer to development, several volunteers bought the herd in order to keep the project going on another property.

There’s definitely no plans to expand to other cities although people of course are welcome to try on their own and use us as a resource for how to go about it. The project is a very small nonprofit and its capacity is pretty well tapped just maintaining a herd here in Portland.

Thanks!

Great kickoff questions! And yes, goats do bleat. (Some would say a sheep sounds like “bah” and a goat sounds like “meh”.)

We’re going to let our volunteers on our Slack get into 1. and 4. before answering them there, but as for the others:

We have not looked into collaborating with The Mountain Goats but an early volunteer goatherd and artist once painted three of our goats standing atop each other chewing off band posters from a telephone pole. (None of them were The Mountain Goats.)

The intention of an urban herd springs from the original field (on SE Belmont in Portland) where after three years of rented herds an adjacent business owner started his own there because he just liked seeing goats there. It wasn’t long before it was clear that people really used the site as a respite, and when that property was being developed, some of the volunteers bought the herd in order to keep that going.

Thanks! We’ll be back to get to the other two questions!

One possible explanation is that this was a parent goat and a child. goat. But sometimes goats are just stubborn and are going to do what they want. Your basic approach of just trying to alter the goat’s trajectory rather than directly push back is basically correct. Pushing back against a goat doesn’t really get you anywhere good, really.