38 Comments

When a goat is in its natural environment, it would be more difficult for the predators to get access to them because they would be resting in spaces quite difficult to reach; such as nooks and crannies and mountains and halfway up trees. Creating these artificial spaces to farm them we have opened them up to large spaces where their natural predators have much better access to them. Our fault entirely! Thus it is one of the tunes we are receivers of.

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Oct 23·edited Oct 23Liked by Jasun Horsley

As someone who has been raising dairy goats for 41 years, a word of advice on fencing... actually two words; cattle panels. It's more expensive than the wire fence but you'll never have to replace it. Just walk the parameters every now and then to make sure the panels are still firmly connected to the posts. (I use U-bolts on the posts.)

Also, since you live in an area with wolves, you might want to get a couple of stockguard dogs or donkeys.

Best of luck with your caprine beasties.

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Donkey is an idea but then we have to build another barn

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Oct 25Liked by Jasun Horsley

We/My wife has donkeys. You would need them in the plural, min 2, not to isolate them. Although they are claimed to coexist, as an individual, well with goats. In Galicia you would indeed need a barn, they do not like wind/rain. Do note that their hooves need regular maintenance. Esp when they are kept on non rocky surfaces. A nice big ‘boerboel’ might be lower maintenance and up to the task.

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what happens when a donkey has to go it solo? he goes mad?

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..well they are very sociable and ‘intelligent’ creatures. Real characters. Kept as a single mixed with goats could work from what I know, they have some challenges/play. Kept by themselves (with no interaction) they are claimed to dwindle away. Pls note that they can be very vocal and ‘chat’ with fellow donkeys in the surrounding area. Same for feeding time, if you are late they will remind you :)

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I am sure it would irritate me but perhaps not trigger me the way barking dogs tend to, & I presume not be relentless in the way dogs can be (provided the donkey gets fed!)

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Oct 28Liked by Jasun Horsley

I have Anatolian shepherd, Akbash, two mixed Anatolian aka bash, and a great pyrenees. so far, these all have come because a coyote ate some chickens. and shooting coyotes in the middle of the night is a big hassle. and the rage that comes from your stock being predated upon is tough to handle. since then, the Akbash has been the quietest but the meanest (female), the Anatolian the sweetest personality and moderately barky, but also stays close ( a male with a vasectomy) the half and half both females aggressive but less bark than Anatolian, and the pyranese so far the barkiest of them all, but personality of a golden shepherd. the evening barks are all about stay away coyote bear wolf, im here. there have been zero losses in the years since then. but if you have large wolves then you'll need more than just one dog anyway, a good couple or few to take the roles of guardian. you get used to and appreciate the barks, because they equal I dont have to go outside and look for whatever is thinking about eating a goat (or chicken or whatever). we here are getting dwarf goats in a few weeks from our daughter, the babies. we have bears in our neighborhood fierce enough the doors need to be reinforced to keep the bears out even when you are home. not once since the dogs have any bears or coyotes been in sight though. down the street, all the chickens got ate couple times, they had lost their dog to a road accident. since then they've got dogs again and alls well. I wanna donkey or two also, but im used to dogs. I just wanna donkeys for the cool sounds and interesting personalities.

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upside is apparently you have a plan for when an animal triggers you

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Yes, sticking to the routine helps. Also if there are no donkeys in the area they will spare their ‘breath’… The offset of keeping the wolves out, thus sparing your goats, vs some added donkey chatter falls in favor of the goats I think. Come to think about it… less ‘death by wolf’ has some unknown advantage in their afterlife/reincarnation process lol.

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Yes, I was going to suggest donkeys as well!

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Oct 25Liked by Jasun Horsley

Are u aware that most of Robinson Crusoe is a detailed description of trying to build a goat enclosure? And he needed the goat to survive.

Same author detailed the Plague year....

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author

I was not; now I have to read it

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Oct 27Liked by Jasun Horsley

I empathise with you but also your goats as if your goats feel cramped or don't have enough grazing space, they are more likely to try to escape. The system is constraining me and I feel like I want to escape, just like your goats.

Unlike them however, I don't have the guts/energy/opportunity to follow through on my instinct. So I am alive but a slave. That's 'safe and effective' for you!

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hola, jasun.

this was fun and interesting to read! loved it. so much so that i responded. in ways likely inappropriately eccentric.

you wrote:

“the body is a receiver-transmitter created by god (the ineffable, eternal formless) as an instrument, by which to both compose and conduct his symphony.”

my edit:

“the body is a receiver-transmitter created by god (the ineffable, eternal formless) as an instrument, by which to both compose and *decompose*, conduct and *cacaphonise* his symphony.”

and so many synchronicities! this one with a friend yesterday, with something he said and did and how he reacted to getting a malformed ice cream stick: from the alchemist by paulo coehlo, in which the protagonist is a young shepherd who has been blessed by his father and then by the universe to follow the truth of his dream. a part of the blessing he received was an awareness of the unspoken language of the universe, which in one important form i understand be synchronicities. from the alchemist:

“the boy picked up urim and thummim [the two stones, one black (’no’) and one white (‘yes’) to help decide his true state and path forward], and, once again, had the strange sensation that the old king [who had blessed him at the start of his journey] was nearby. he had worked hard for a year, and the omens [language of synchronicities] were [telling him that] it was time for him to go.

i’m going to go back to doing just what i did before, the boy thought. even though the sheep didn’t teach me to speak arabic.

but the sheep had taught him something even more important: that there is a language in the world that everyone understood, a language the boy had used throughout the time that he as trying to improve things sin the shop. it was the language of enthusiasms, of things accomplished with love and purpose, and as part of the search for something believed in and desired. …” (pg 64).

i read that early this morning, and now it lines up with your goat-glarer essay. the synchronicities continue with your cat-speak! your cat synchronicity-ed(?) with something i heard jbp say yesterday, paraphrased — moving up in awareness of/into the ineffable/god is to be climbing jacob’s ladder which is comprised of levels that extend above the one attained without end.

during my current exploration of my father’s anger that is stuck in my body as pain in my right hip, the endlessness of the ineffable language of ‘god’ as synchronicity has inundated me. including my getting a signed copy of paulo coelho’s ‘the alchemist’ from the library’s books-for-sale shelves less than 24hrs after your wife suggested it to me. and that night and in the days since it has provided me with several synchronicities, including the language one above.

you wrote:

‘god is nowhere’.

my edit:

‘god is nowhere’ ———> god is now-here’; (or, what i like better, ‘god is here now’, which with a little escape out of the strictures of imagination can become ‘god is (a) hernia)’.

and have you misspelled/misplaced the devil, as french, not spanish or even galician? what might the mystical symbolism of that be? perhaps the shopping list of eco’s foucault’s pendulum mistaken for a conspiracy of the knights templar to create not just a great book but the denouement of a rosicrucian tale.

well, back to my epistle-essay in kinship with montaigne and the synchronicities of a father’s anger and a painful hip.

a fun read!

all the best with what is changing. everything changes.

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author

the godisnowhere is an old play on words (i misstyped wores!); yes diable, being the root of the word double, not so obvious in other languages

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clarification, I typed GODISNOWHERE as one word, which you chose to read as "God is nowhere" and then "reinterpret" as "God is now here"!

Plagiarism? :D

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it is the good ideas that get plagiarised, though? hhhhhmmmmm.

okay, okay. it is quite likely that really bad ideas are more frequently plagiarised. then maybe it is the discerning who are want to plagiarise the good ideas. (of course, 'the' problem might be, how would i know whether or not i'm discerning?!)

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A lot of wisdom spread on this carpet, out of which the following gem sparkles to intrigue me most today:

"whether we can extract a homeopathic dose of medicine from the poisons of mass culture."

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Keep writing.

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Time for a goat relocation, they are a special kind of crazy, I didn’t even last a month with mine, I gave them to a grateful farmer. And dude, any kind of mistreatment of an animal means you definitely shouldn’t not own said animal.

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author

PC BS

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So what exactly does this mistreatment of your animals entail? Beatings? Tying them up? Screaming at them?

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Having suffered the slings & arrows of the pet police on Faceborg (https://childrenofjob.substack.com/p/exposing-the-accuser-within), I will exercise the right to remain silent in the face of the current charges.

Suffice it to say I consider "animal rights," along with the Disneyifcation of Nature by which animals are assigned human feelings & qualities, to have gone too far & to be another symptom of the "care-state-control" mechanism of Big Mother state by which "compassion" becomes another cattle prod to keep us in line.

To hear the gory details would require eligibility for the men's meeting. ;)

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How awful, and yet you pose with them for likes. I am done with you, dude. Just another abuser kicking the abuse down the line. I really hope you don’t have any children and your hideous family history ends with you.

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author

Animal lover shows true colors as human hater.

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kinda looks like it's directed at you only

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Oct 27Liked by Jasun Horsley

Thanks for this comment because although baseless and hateful it helped me realize something about my experience of Jasun. I've never witnessed him doing anything for likes-in dialogue, groups, writing. In fact it's as if he exists in some outer perimeter, inspecting the smaller difficult bits of life, where cultural man won't normally tread.

If you're concerned with kicking abuse down the line, why are you engaging in it yourself MamaBearIsMad?

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Oct 27Liked by Jasun Horsley

Man vs Nature. Story old as time. Why the hate..

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I know, right? I mean, who doesn't love animal mistreatment, other than dumb PC libtards? it's good you doubled down

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Goats are certainly a handful so I've heard! Nothing like being connected to the land to bring us out of our minds. Morgoth's Review has talked about his fishing and gardening as a way to reconnect.

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Alpacas, or guardian dogs (maremmas possibly). They have to be trained to protect and can't be treated as pets.

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Loved reading this. Sad for the goatlings.

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Quite beautiful, but occasionally way too fundamentalist for me... Kinda makes me want to visit you... As for goats, get a dog, there are suitable breeds in Spain for sure...

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I don't care for dogs that bark, which would be very much the point of having one here.

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Btw, how's your 5 quid movie progressing?

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A rough cut has been delivered; that's a story unto itself; a learning experience in so many ways.

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