Goats in the garden...

... and no, they weren't our goats.

Looking out the window yesterday to see if the cats were on the porch, and what did I see?  Both Mickey and Gatsby on the porch with their heads between the spindles of the porch railing... staring at half a dozen of the neighbor's goats as they munched on a rose bush in one of the flowerbeds.

I thought quickly and got the air-horn that my husband uses to scare away the crows, and I went out on the porch, down the steps, and blasted that air-horn towards the goats. Not only did the six rose-destroying goats run down the driveway, but so did the other ten goats who were grazing around the gazebo.  Down the hill they went, running towards their own pasture, and then they all jumped the fence, one by one, to get back to their own property. Needless to say, that neighbor's fence needs repair, and  although he's fixed most of the fence, the part that's closest to our road is woefully lacking in stability, which makes it easy for the goats to escape.

To further make my point with those goats, I blasted the air-horn again when they got to their fence and they kept running and running till they all ended up at the very far end of their pasture, as far away from our property as they could get.  The rose bush that they were eating is now devoid of the new leaves that were popping up. How they managed to eat around all the thorns is just a mystery to me.

The funny part was that my husband looked up "how to keep goats away" on the Internet, and one of the sites he found via Google was one of my own previous blog posts talking about runaway goats from neighboring properties.