Abort the Snort!!

Our goats...you gotta love 'em. I mean they are cute, the provide entertainment, they....are cute. But there's one time of the day that they reallly "get my goat",if you know what I mean! It's early (and I mean sometimes like 4:30AM early!) in the morning. Here's the problem....they sleep on the front porch. That's not too much of a problem, except for all the poop they leave behind that has to be cleaned up (we use a leaf blower) everyday...but believe it or not "blowing poop" is one of the top coveted morning chores! Gotta love boys! But anyway, back to the goats.....sometimes they do wake me up as I hear them bumping along the wall and wiggling for the best position. But the REAL problem comes when early in the morning, for some very unknown reason, they start fighting. It used to be just every now and then. Now it's like almost every morning! And the fighting is loud. They get up on their hind legs (it's usually 2 on 2-the goats, not the legs) and stare each other down and then bump each other with the horns. Annoying-certainly! And loud!! Urrrgh! NOT what you want to wake up to. Seriously it wakes me up every time and I can't get back to sleep. Well, to make matters worse, now they start SNORTING at each other right before the "stand up on my hind legs and bump you with my horns ritual". The snorting sounds not like a pig snort or grunt, it sounds like a grown man sneezing. Over and over and over and over and over...you get my drift. So now in the early morning, here's my alarm....scraaaaape (body's moving along the wall), snort, snort, wierd goat noise that sounds eerily human, thud of horns together. Repeat about 25 times. It's like the alarm clock from a nightmare. Worse thing is there's no snooze. Now once I start to hear snorting, I get a sick sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach. You know the "It can't be time to get up yet!" sinking feeling. Or really it's more like the "Oh, man there's thebaby crying and no one else is going to get up to get him. Shoot!" sinking feeling. Sometimes I get up and turn a light on and they just look at me with that blank kinda stupid goat look...like Jeb here.....pictured here with Jessie, who definitely wins the "Extreme Snorter" award!

Then sometimes I dodge the poop and walk out there and talk to them and tell them to mix it up somewhere else. The two that are nearest the stairs walk down to the very bottom step, the two that aren't near the stairs jump off the porch...but just until I leave. Then it's "back to business"....up on the porch!

My bleary bloodshot eyes and mornings of moaning prompted Michael to find a solution. We googled and found basically nothing. Michael went out last weekend and bought a box of mothballs, thinking the smell might keep him away. I was thinking "Honey, if they can stand the smell of the BARN that they leave for us every night on the front porch, I'm thinking they may not be so turned off my mothballs". But we gave it a try. *I* was VERY turned off by the smell of mothballs. The goats never missed a beat. Do goats HAVE a sense of smell?? Surely if they did, they would counsel each other to go roll in some sweet smelling grass or something! Well, we got rid of the mothballs. Honestly, I'd rather smell "barn" than mothballs! So, tonight, we're bringing out PLAN B.....

One website Michael saw suggested squirting the goats with water guns anytime they were in a place where you didn't want them. So, we're going to give that a try. The main logistical problem with this is...you guessed it....I have to get out of bed to get them. I just might give my sweet hubby a "poke" and send him on the mission, but he's not the one who hears the "things that go bump in the night". Kinda like having a newborn, ya know. Mom always hears them! The boys brainstorm all kinds of tripwires and alarms and lights, etc. but really that defeats the purpose. I still wake up, and the goats, I'm sure, would still stare blankly!


So we'll see how this plan goes. In the mean time.....

We're ready for action!!