IS GOAT-KEEPING WORTH WHILE P
WHEN the Quarterly Review comes out with two pages of photographs of goats the cause of "the poor man's cow" would seem to be making progress. In the current issue "Home Counties" states very fully "The Case for the Goat."
The long-despised milk-giver lost a good friend in the late Lady Burdett-Coutts, for so many years president of the Goat Society; but it would appear that the goat has other influential advocates. "All my children," writes the Duchess of Hamilton to "Home Counties," "have had goats' milk, and have done very well on it." Lady Dunleath testifies to the remarkable effect of milk from "the poor man's cow" on the infants of a village in which she takes a benevolent interest, and Miss Rose Hubbard, Miss Iris Mitford, and other ladies give evidence as to its palatability. An authority quoted has no fewer than seventy goats ; another has fifty ; a third and fourth possess thirty and thirty-eight respectively. One of the goat-keepers has had a succession of "nannies" in his possession for thirty- five years, another has had an experience of thirty years, and three others of about twenty years. From these facts, as well as from the growing membership of the Goat Society and the imposing exhibits of goats at the dairy and many county agricultural shows, it would appear that goat- keeping has become a serious interest in many directions. Nobody knows bow many goats there are in the country, because the Board of Agriculture for England and Scotland, unlike the Irish Board, does not see fit to include them in its agrioultural census. In Ireland it is found that there are nearly three hundred thousand goats. As to the Continent, seventeen countries were returned a quarter of a century ago as possessing seventeen million animals. In Switzerland and Norway the goats were in the ratio of one to every fourteen and sixteen inhabitants. Swiss goat-keepers have long had the encouragement of the State to develop the milking-powers of their stock to the utmost degree, and a work entitled "La Chevre," which we lately reviewed, showed the results of intelligent interest in goat-keeping in France. Our Board of Agriculture has many irons in the fire just now, but it is much to be wished that it could spare time to do something to help forward the benevolent work of those who are trying to increase the number of goats kept in our rural districts. Experts say that one of the best services the authorities could render would be to permit, under proper conditions of quaran- tine, the importation of new blood from good Continental strains of goats; but the Board could also do something by means of one of its leaflets, if in no other way, to dispel the ignorance which prevails as to the economic value of vacca pauperis. This ignorance is sometimes remarkable. Quite recently Dr. Freyberger, pathologist to the London County Council, actually stated that goat's milk was "worse than skimmed milk, and does not contain sufficient fat and sugar." The fact is that it is better than new cow's milk. Goat's milk has repeatedly shown on analysis seven per cent, of fat against three and a half in cow's milk. Another erroneous notion, that the goat is evil-smelling, also dies bard. It is only the male animal that has an offensive odour, and not one in twenty goat-keepers need to have a " billy " of their own. As for the alleged objectionable flavour in goat's milk, which those who speak of it have usually met with abroad, it is due either to dirty vessels or to wrong feeding. The present writer has repeatedly found that, when glasses of goat's milk and cow's milk have been placed before persons unaccustomed to goat's milk, they have been unable to tell one from the other except by the greater richness of the goat's milk, and not at all when this clue has been removed by the watering down of the goat's milk to the quality of cow's milk.
The case for goat-keeping rests principally on three argu- ments. In the first place, in many villages where cow's milk does not enter the cottages in anything like the quantities it ought to do, goat's milk would be of great value. "Home Counties" prints testimony from Surrey, Kent, and Yorkshire that labourers' families in the localities in which his corre- spondents reside do not get half enough milk. The farmers find it more convenient to send off their milk in bulk to the railway station, or to separate it all, and use the " skim " for the pigs and calves, instead of peddling it out in twopence- worths at the kitchen-door. The second plea for goat's milk is based on the quite remarkable benefit it confers on children in comparison with cow's milk. In this connexion readers may be referred to the quotations in the Quarterly from the medical Press and such works as Dr. Eustace Smith's. The third argument is that in this country goat's milk, unlike cow's milk, may be regarded as free from the bacillus of tuberculosis The late Sir William Broadbent and other authorities declared roundly that "goats do not suffer from
tuberculosis." This is the belief of almost every goat-keeper. If goats are not, in fact, absolutely immune—the ill-cared-for breed in Malta is undoubtedly affected by tuberculosis—the Board of Agriculture itself has testified that the disease is most rare, and milk from British goats may be regarded as practically above suspicion of that taint which makes much cow's milk so risky a food for infants and invalids. "The British public is phlegmatic," said a medical paper the other day ; "but about the milk question it shows a callous- ness which can only come from wilful ignorance. The attitude amounts to fatalism or trusting to luck." People who have not been wilfully ignorant, and are at length awakened to the drawbacks attending the use by children of milk like much of that which is commonly sold, may be safely recommended to the goat for a supply which will meet every reasonable requirement from the health point of view. The difficulty is, of course, that a single goat does not yield very much milk. On the other hand, one goat does not cost much to keep. But the milking-powers of modern goats are greater than is supposed. There is an animal at Great Waltham which has given a gallon a day. "Home Counties" reproduces a photograph of a goat which yielded half-a-ton in a year, and he says that "there are plenty of goats which give five gallons a week, and thousands which yield a somewhat smaller quantity." At a recent Dairy Show one goat gave 7-0 pounds of milk in a day a hundred and seventy-four days after kidding, and another 38 pounds when she had been two hundred and forty-five days in milk. The ideal of the goat-keeper is not to retain an animal which does not give two quarts at kidding. The prices of good goats, largely of foreign blood, are of course much higher than the sums for which mongrel " English " or "Welsh" animals may be secured. An experienced goat- keeper put down 21 2s. as the yearly loss on a three-year- old goat, bought for 23 10s., and sold locally in about two years' time at 21 10s. To this amount he added 22 128. in respect of food, stud fee, and incidentals, and a sovereign as a contribution towards labour and housing. This made a total of 24 148., against which he set, say, a quart and a half of milk received daily for six months, then a quart for three months, and finally half-a-quart for one month, or three hundred and seventy-nine quarts for ten months, which at fivepence a quart would be 27 178. 11d. On these figures there is a profit on the year of 23 3s. 11d. It will be observed that the milk is priced more highly than cow's milk because it can be watered down and still be of the same value as the article which varies in cost between threepence and fourpence. Mr. Bryan Hook, who has a goat dairy at Farnham, sells his goat's milk at fourpence a pint. The expense of feeding a goat depends entirely on whether it is stalled or allowed to graze. A cottager's goat need cost very little, for even if there is no common on which it may browse, it may be led about the lanes by its owner's children, and be enabled to eat its fill without costing a penny. The varied herbage of the wayside is also the diet on which goats thrive best. It need hardly be added that as a consumer of garden waste the goat is unrivalled. It refuses nothing.
But if the goat has so many useful qualities, how does it come about that it is in need of advocates ? It must be admitted that there are some drawbacks to goat-keeping. The goat, as the origin of the word capricious indicates, is a wayward animal. It is marvellously agile, extraordinarily mischievous, and the springhook, swivels, chain, and tether- ing-pin which can be trusted to hold it in all conditions have yet to be invented. When a goat is pegged out there is always a chance of its getting loose,—usually by a twig or grass getting entangled in the chain, and so stopping the action of the swivels and prising up the peg as the bored animal gallops round in a circle. A goat can only be allowed its liberty in an iron-barred or well-wired paddock containing a dry shelter. Although remarkably robust animals and accommodating as to food and lodging, it is necessary that goats shall be kept, in Horace's words, "apart from wind and rain and heat." Such matters may be arranged, but two diffi- culties remain. There is the doubt of getting the "nannies" to come into use no as to maintain a constant milk-supply, and the trouble, when they kid, of disposing of their young. A strong infusion of foreign blood seems to induce a disposi- tion to breed at other times than the spring; but there appears to be no way of dealing profitably with kids of average value than by killing them at birth. This is not a pleasant task, and unless they are destroyed before the mother suckles them, she will complain in a voice which is likely to be beard over most of the parish. We have now set forth, however, all the objections which can be honestly urged against the keeping of what have been well called "the most intelligent, most engaging, and most picturesque of domestic cattle." Few who have once kept goats have desired to give them up. If we cannot assert with Mohammed that 'there is no house possessing a goat but a blessing abideth therein, and no house containing three goats but the angels spend the night praying there," we do believe that the keeping of a goat or two of good quality would be of immense value to thousands of our cottagers, and that landowners and rural residents who help to make known the merits of "the poor man's cow" are doing a real service to our country districts.
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