Goats on the road....

I am so tired of chasing away the neighbor's goats. At least once a week, half of those goats get out of their field.... the larger ones jump right over the fence, and the little ones crawl under. Being that this particular neighbor uses those goats as a food source, one would think he'd want to keep his livestock on his own property. Personally, I don't care if the neighbor's goats are loose.... I just don't want them on our property because they will eat everything in sight, whether it be wildflowers or rosebushes.

When we first moved here, I used to just drive one of the cars down the road... the goats would see the vehicle headed their way and they would either jump back over the fence or run down our hill and then turn left and run up their own hill.  I used my car for goat-herding until the day that my car got caught in the gravel at the side of the road and slipped a bit down off the road. In order to get back on the road, I had to drive in the tall grass on the road's shoulder, hoping beyond all hope that there wasn't a soft spot or a very small goat underneath that high grass.

Then I started to walk down the hill holding the broom.... the goats either didn't like the looks of me or didn't like the looks of the broom, and they jumped back over the fence and ran to the other side of their field.

My husband was home one day when the goats got out of their property and he used the air-horn to blast them back onto their own pasture.  One blast was all it took... that rattling, deafening sound echoing around the hills here for miles.  So that's what I do now with the goats.  This afternoon, I got that air-horn, walked down the road a bit towards the goats, and blasted that thing for all it was worth. Clearly, the goats don't like the sound (neither do I) and off they went running..... some jumping over the fence, smaller ones crawling underneath the fence......... and as I walked back towards our driveway, I could still hear the blasting of the air-horn in my own ears.

Problem with the air-horn is that it also scares our cats.  When I got back to our porch, there was Mickey and Gatsby, both of them with looks on their faces that would stop a train.  Gatsby gets highly insulted when his naps are disturbed, and Mickey just looks pitiful.  There's no apologizing to cats, as any cat-person will tell you.  It will take the cats the rest of the day to get over the loud noises that I made with the air-horn which hurt their feelings and hurt their ears.