The Goat That Learned the Latch
One nanny goat figured out my gate latch in a single afternoon and had the whole herd out on a county road tour before supper.
I keep eleven goats on the place, mostly for brush control and partly because my wife says a farm without goats is just a yard. One of them is a nanny named Pearl, who is smarter than the loan officer and more patient than the feed store. I had put a new latch on her gate that spring, one of those spring-loaded numbers advertised as animal proof. I should have known the word proof was a challenge.
Pearl spent a full afternoon watching me go in and out. She did not graze. She just stood by the fence, chewing nothing, like a bank examiner. The next morning I came out and the gate was open, the pen was empty, and a line of goat tracks wandered off down the county road toward town. I drove after them in the truck, and what I found, about two miles on, was eleven goats standing politely in a row at the one stop sign, waiting their turn.
A school bus was idling at the sign. The driver, a woman I have known since high school, had the door open and was laughing so hard she had put her head on the steering wheel. Thirty kids were pressed against the windows with their phones out. Pearl looked at me like I was late. I got out and counted heads, and the count was right, which is the single most disappointing thing about goats, because it means they knew exactly where they were going and chose it anyway.
I walked them home the way you walk a parade. Pearl led, the rest followed, and I trailed behind with a bucket of feed, rattling it like a tambourine. Back at the pen I examined the latch for a good ten minutes. It was fine. It worked perfectly. She had simply lifted the spring with her lip, a thing that, according to the folks at a small-farm guide I later read, is a very common goat skill. I put a second latch on the gate, and a third one up high, and a padlock. The next morning Pearl had opened all three, and the padlock was hanging from the fence like an earring. I wrote the whole saga up for farm.FM, and the comments were mostly goat owners nodding in grim recognition.