The Story of Sasha the Wonder Goat

I've been sitting on this blog post since late 2015.  I used the Facebook photo post below in a birthday blog post about things that make me happy, but I never posted the full, not-happy story behind it.
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This is the story of Sasha the Wonder Goat.  Well, that's not entirely accurate.  I don't know the beginning of Sasha's story, and the people who know her ending won't tell me (which is information enough to know what demise she met).  Much of the middle of her story was probably sad, because she lived on a small, flat grass field with no enrichment and nothing to jump or climb on, as all goats need.  But for a brief time, my story intersected with hers, and I will never forget her.  So this is the story of how the beautiful soul that I named Sasha the Wonder Goat intersected with my story.

The following is from a Facebook post in October 2014:

I went back the next week. Sasha came right over to me as soon as I approached the fence, snuggling up for some more love for 15 minutes (as did the pigs, who immediately flopped over for belly rubs the instant I touched their bellies and stayed like this,

happily snorting while they got what might have been the only belly rubs of their short lives...).  I could have stayed with Sasha all day, happily scratching under her chin, getting the spots behind her ears, stroking her neck as she leaned into my hand.  I only left her when a child came over to pet her, explaining to him that she was gentle and affectionate and wouldn't bite (I've observed that when children approach farm animals, no matter how docile and affectionate the animal, where a parent would encourage them to pet a dog or cat, they instead generally discourage any bonding with goats or sheep or pigs and encourage distrust and wariness instead -- nor is there commonly any verbal prompting to only touch the animals gently rather than poking and prodding and teasing).  As I walked away from Sasha and the pigs, my eyes filled with the tears I had promised my fiancé I wouldn't let the animals see, as, for all the mean kids who poke and tease them and say they look yummy, or those who think they're too dirty and scary to he touched, they deserved to know someone who gave them nothing but happiness.  I knew the pigs' fate, and I cried for them, because anyone who spent ten minutes with them could see they were as friendly, intelligent, curious, and affectionate as dogs, and they had such distinct personalities to me I couldn't conceive of how someone could eat them.  But the goats' fates I wasn't sure of.  The farm's website refers only to them being used to keep vegetation in check -- not to being either dairy goats or food goats, and I could see Sasha in photos on the farm's Facebook page going back several years.  I know their pigs are killed at only six months, so without knowing how long their goats are kept, since she had been there several years I assumed that aside from her lack of climbing equipment, Sasha was safe from harm for the time being.  She even seemed to be the farm's star goat. She was the goat in the photo on their website, she continued to show up in pictures on their Facebook page, and she was the one shown in a television news story about the farm at Easter, with a child petting her.  I was also aware, though, that the farm does send most of their animals to slaughter and doesn't believe in animals living for any purpose other than to be productive for human consumption -- and that most of the goats were turning over even while Sasha seemed to have been staying there throughout the years....  So it was with great trepidation every time I went to visit her.

And then the following fall, after I passed the new pair of pigs playing in their mud hole who would be slaughtered by Christmas and passed the roosters who were packed in so tight they had plucked each other bare and were covered in blood and sores, I approached the goat enclosure....  There was no Sasha.  I could feel my eyes well up instantaneously even as I looked all the goats over again to make sure I hadn't missed her, and I bit the tears back while I pet a new white goat and my fiancé silently walked the enclosure, checking in their sun coverings to make sure she wasn't lying down in the shade somewhere.  As I looked up at him when he reached the last shade covering and he shook his head at me, the tears started rolling down my cheeks for the loss of my friend.  And just like that another brown goat who on my last visit had noticeably been Sasha's friend picked up her head from eating and looked at me, then walked over and pressed herself against the fence towards me.  Another huge white goat stopped picking food from a branch and came towards me as well.  By the time my fiancé got back to me, I was stretching my hands between petting three goats at once, all of them offering their necks for neck rubs and leaning into my hands.  But I'm not sure who was really petting and comforting whom. 

 

After a few minutes, a little girl came over and touched one of them for a few seconds.

 

"Careful, don't get too close!" her mom warned sharply.

 

"Oh, they're not dangerous," I said.

 

"She's so cute!" the girl exclaimed, still petting the goat.

 

"It's a goat, get over it."

 

"Did she honestly just say 'Get over it?!'" I couldn't help saying outloud to my fiancé.  "It's a goat, get over it?!!!"

 

After the mom pulled the little girl away, reminding her that they eat goats, a dad and his little boy came over, and the dad looked at us, smiled, and said, "I take it they're friendly?"

 

"Yes!  Very much so!  Just pet them gently.  They particularly like behind their ears.  They're just like dogs."

 

As another goat came over to me, the dad replied with a laugh, "Are you like the goat whisperer or something?"

 

"I think it's just that no one ever treats them this way," I said with a smile.  "Most people won't pet them.  If you treat them with kindness, they'll come over to you."

 

"He's so fluffy!" the boy said with a big smile on his face, and then another goat came over to him.  As the boy started to rub his hand through the goat's fur, the dad said gently, "Remember to only pet him with the fur -- you wouldn't pet a dog against his fur, right?  So just like that."

 

I smiled up at my fiancé with watery eyes, but they were happy tears this time.  Maybe I was watching the creation of another goat whisperer.  I stepped back from my gaggle of goats and let the boy and his dad take over petting and loving them, and I nodded to my fiancé that it was time to walk away from the animals while they were getting kindness from someone else.  The goats might be slaughtered in the not-too-distant future, but hopefully that boy's experience with them would be enduring and he would be one less kid who pokes and prods them, one less adult who says, "Mmm, dinner!" or "It's a [goat, pig, cow, etc], get over it!" to his own child one day.

 

The farm wouldn't tell me what happened to Sasha the Wonder Goat... which means I know what happened to her.  When I think of what a sweet, loving soul she was, how she'd come right to me when she saw me and her eyes would scrunch up like a cat's as she basked in affection, how she'd outsmart all the other goats when she wanted food by climbing on top of them as they jockeyed for the best position and then climb down and look all sweet and innocent as she munched away while they still jostled for the food, how her goat friend came right to me when I started crying over her, it breaks my heart to think of the complete terror and pain that must have filled her final moments; it breaks my heart that these animals are treated like products and processed like a can of soup, without a thought about what's in their own best interest to enjoy a happy life for their own sake.

 

But when I think about that boy and his dad, I smile with hope.