In rural Thailand they use geese to mow their lawns and keep the weeds down. If there were any goats around I didn't see them. I think goats get to smelling so bad in the tropics that not even a peasant farmer can stand it. Thais are certainly particular about smells -- they bathe several times a day when they have the chance. And many of them told me that 'farangs' (foreigners) smell bad because we don't bathe often enough and eat too much meat.
When I worked for Carson & Barnes Five Ring Circus they had a petting zoo that had a bunch of goats. Persian goats, Manx goats, Patched goats, and African jumping goats. There was one guy in charge of washing the goats every day, so that kids could pet them without starting to gag on the smell. I didn't envy him his job; he was a cousin to the trapeze act, from Chile, and had tagged along, or been kidnapped, just because he was very docile and amenable to any kind of crap work. Those goats would butt him in the belly all day long, while he used a yellow bar of laundry soap to lather 'em up. I suppose the soap got in their eyes and really stung; that's why they hated the poor guy so much. At the end of the season they ganged up on him and devoured him, right down to his flip flops.
A few years back I was in a homeless shelter in Virginia where the residents were tasked with taking care of a big vegetable garden and clipping Angora goats for their wool. I was lucky enough to be assigned to weeding turnips, so I never had to deal with the goats at all. They spoke Portuguese, I don't know why. The goats did, not the people tending them. The goat tenders only spoke in curse words, from what I ever heard. At night the goats would climb into the locust trees to roost. It was a nice homeless shelter; I was sorry when it burned down a few weeks after I got there. The fire was started by one of the goats smoking in a locust tree and falling asleep. But we sure had a lot of savory roasted goat for the next couple of days while we lived in tents.
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