Nebulous Mooch

About six months ago I decided that when I finally owned my own house I would get some chickens and a goat. This may be shocking to some of you considering my general fear of animals, especially animals that flap, hop or have horizonally slit pupils like the devil.

All of this aside, I thought goats and chickens could be a good addition to our household. We could have free eggs whenever we wanted and I like egg. We could also have free milk for making kefir and yogurt and butter and cheese and whatever else I can make with milk. I even picked out the ideal goat breed. Nigerian dwarf goats would be my goats of choice. They’re suppose to get make enough milk to feed a family and they’re small. I would have two. They would need to keep each other company.

My passion for raising goats has waned recently. Not because I realized I’d have to milk them every day–imagine me milking a goat–or because I’d have to clean up after them, or because they’re smelly and they make that goat noise all the time, but because I tasted some goat yogurt.

I bought some goat yorgurt. I like to try new things. We can eat some yogurt on out exciting Candida diet to try to get some probiotic into our systems. We can also have a moderate amount of grains so the other day I had oatmeal for breakfast. I mixed it with some goat yogurt and blueberries. Ladies and gentlemen, don’t try this at home. It was disgusting. Goats don’t make the same nice tastey yogurt like that cows do. Instead, goat milk makes something similar to goat cheese. Goat cheese is good, but it’s not good in your oatmeal.

Anyway, I’ve had it in for goats ever since they ruined my oatmeal. I’ve decided there will be no goats for me because I just can’t put up with that kind of unpredictability in my dairy products.

I’m still considering chickens. I’ve recently found out that you can tell what color eggs a hen will produce by looking at her earlobes. I didn’t even know chickens had earlobes. Maybe they have lips too.

Photo by Just Chaos.

Sometimes I just say exactly what I’m thinking. This isn’t always a good idea. Especially when what I’m thinking isn’t very smart. This is what happened last night at dinner.

“Where do chickens come from?” I asked.

“Eggs,” my husband laughed.

My stepson flipped through his world history book ignoring yet another ridiculous dinner conversation.

“I mean you don’t see them in the wild, so who invented them?”

This question was met with even more laughter. “You don’t invent an animal,” my husband said.

“They must’ve come from somewhere. Like maybe someone cross bred a turkey and a duck or something.” I have an excuse for this statement. You see, I’ve been very tired the past few days and my brain hasn’t been working right.

This got my stepson’s attention. “What are you talking about?” he asked.

“Where did chickens come from?” I asked him. He knows a lot about history. I thought he might give me a good answer.

“I don’t know,” he shrugged and resumed his reading.

After dinner I looked up the history of the chicken on the internet. No they are the result of a breeding experiment involving turkeys and ducks. Chickens were found in the wild in China and India and where first domesticated in 7000BC. That answers my question.