missvoltairine:

jhameia:

fromonesurvivortoanother:

This is a post about goats

I am filled with so many questions about these pictures: Where are they? What kind of goats are these? Why do they do that? I feel like if they were answered, I could come to a place of great profundity.

Goats just do that. Doesn’t matter where. Goats like to be up high. They’ll climb whatever is around, even other, larger animals, like cows.

Now you know this about goats.

I so want a goat to ‘mow’ my back yard.  It is big, hilly and I hate mowing it. Font yard is bigger, but flatter and I don’t mow a lot of the ‘meadow’ area and a lot of the rest is garden.   But yeah, this part about goats has delayed doing that.  Raised angora goats for mohair as a kid so have had some experience with their climbing.  I need to improve some fences and trim some trees first.

letterstomycountry:

From The Daily What: Geek:

Spider-Goats of the Day: Dutch scientist Jalila Essaïdi wants to make human skin as strong as a bulletproof vest, and her method involves placing a spider-silk matrix between two layers of tissue.

Unfortunately — or fortunately, if you’re arachnophobic — spiders don’t make enough silk fast enough for the project to succeed. So Essaidi is bypassing spiders altogether and using genetically-modified goats instead.

The “spider goats” produce a silk protein that comes out in their milk, allowing scientists to harvest enough to test the bulletproof skin theory. The project looks promising, although it doesn’t yet stop bullets 100% of the time.

Essaïdi’s next goal is to replace keratin in the human body with spider silk, making our entire bodies bulletproof. Why didn’t Peter Parker think of that?

OK, now that is really weird. What kind of dream do you have that gets you up in the morning and start a project like this.

wishididntknowthat:

Goat Attacks Lead Olympic Park to Urge Against Peeing Near Trails

PORT ANGELES, Wash. (Huffington Post) — Olympic National Park in Washington State is urging hikers not to urinate along backcountry trails to avoid attracting mountain goats who lick urine deposits for salt.

The advice is part of a plan to avoid aggressive goats like the one that gored a Port Angeles, Wash., man to death in October.

The Peninsula Daily News reports the popular park also may close trails where goats follow people or enter camp sites.

Backcountry campers are advised to urinate 200 feet away from trails to prevent the trails from turning into “long, linear salt licks.”

Original Article

I had no idea.  Thanks for this - though, as a woman, I always have to go off the trails to pee. 

One indicator that helps us assess grassland health is changes in the goat population relative to those of sheep and cattle. As grasslands deteriorate, grass is typically replaced by desert shrubs. In such a degraded environment, cattle and sheep do not fare well. But goats—being particularly hardy ruminants—forage on the shrubs. Goats are especially hard on the soil because their sharp hoofs pulverize the protective crust of soil that is formed by rainfall and that naturally checks wind erosion. Between 1970 and 2009, the world’s cattle population increased by 28 percent and the number of sheep stayed relatively static. Meanwhile, goat herds more than doubled.