It's what might be best described as a soft morning here at Horton.  We had a little rain in the night, too little to improve the fishing prospects, but enough to make everything soggy.  Just the sort of weather that a goat might well choose to avoid by staying in a dry goat house, but goats being goats that's too straightforward.  My lead nanny has decided that now would be a good time to start looking for billy goats so is roaming the croft, getting wet, shouting and generally being a damned nuisance.  Milking time becomes a battle of subterfuge and a question of who can outwit who.  We start with an eyeball to eyeball confrontation whilst we both size up the prevailing level of intelligence and will.  Then we begin with a sudden jink to the right or left and a rapid trot off down the croft with frequent looks over the shoulder to see if I am following.  I have learnt over the years not to participate in this part of the proceedings, but to wait for the game to become all a bit of a bore then to approach steadily and with a wide flanking movement as if I am making for the sheep sitting off to the right.

Then we move into the end game which can involve a repeat of stage one if we are feeling particularly capricious or a victory for human ingenuity involving either a cornering in the croft, trapping in the goat yard or a quiet slip of the hand under the collar.

Whichever, the outcome is always the same, a rapid gallop towards the milking stand in the barn as if it's me that has been buggering about and it's all about time we got on with the job.  The final act in this performance (repeated every three weeks throughout the winter, folks!) is a careful scrutiny of the barn for the billy goat that must be hidden there somewhere. 

There must be a psychologists explanation why humans find it a challenge to try to outwit dumb animals.  I remember long, long ago seeing girls doing it at disco's, it remains the basis of all country sports and we males never quite seem to get the full hang of it.

Ian