For the past ten days, I’ve been working with a herd of goats on a little farm in eastern Norway. I spend quite a lot of time with these guys, 80 adults and a few dozen kids, lending a hand with milking, feeding, keeping the stables clean (as clean as goat stables can get, at any rate), and generally helping keep their lives as happy as possible. When I first stepped in the stable to meet the goats, the first thing that hit me was the smell. Like a bag of sand. Not that I’m the epitome of olfactory delight (having stopped using deodorant about a month ago), but wow do these kids (pun) have a strong scent. It was a bit difficult to keep my eyes open at first, but once they stopped watering I could see it for what it was: the smell of lots of animals living together on the same bit of land. Kind of made my heart go a little Norman Rockwell. I still smell it now, but I’m used to it, and they don’t seem to mind, so maybe I shouldn’t either.
After some extended exposure and some even smellier duties (pun), the next challenge was presented: milking. Ever milked an animal? For the first twenty-nine-and-a-quarter years of my life I hadn’t. But now I have. Now I do. Almost every day. There are other WWOOFers on the farm, and they, along with Maja, split the chore so no one has to do everything every day.
Before I’d done any of this I thought it would be cool to have some goats. Not sure why goats, but it was goats. I’ve seen a few movies with people who herded goats; maybe I was influenced. These animals seemed independent enough but would listen to and follow a human in a pinch, and I always assumed them to be smarter than sheep. And sometimes in these movies, goats get milked. No big deal, they says. It’s just easy like this, they says. And they goes and milks the goats.
So my first thought was eew… do i actually have to touch those things? I have some irrational fears. Things that dangle. Flapping. Putting any part of my body into a hole of any size (this could have been worded better). Udders dangle, and as it turns out, putting my arms below a hole of a certain size (now you may use your imagination) is close enough to get lumped in. Right off the bat reality and Mike didn’t get along so well. But I’m stuck here for the next five weeks, thought I, so I reached in and I grabbed hold and nothing happened. Maybe I’m just not cut out for this goat business.
What I learned when I was actually down there trying to coax a bit of milk out of some animals who were rapidly losing patience with me was this: you really gotta yank on those suckers. There is a technique, absolutely. Maja is a great and patient teacher, and she loves her goats, so she will not tolerate you doing anything to her goats incorrectly. But one also very quickly develops incredible hand strength when one is in the position of animal milking. I highly recommend milking goats to people whose hobbies include the following: rock climbing, tennis, double bass, origami. The hand and grip strength you build is bar none. The first day continued miserably, and the second was slightly better, but I improved time after time, and spending time with the goats had me treating them more like animals and less like smelly bags of meat, which helped a lot to desensitize me to the dangling and the reaching below holes of a certain size.
In only a few short days I have become a confident hand milker, I can pasteurize and skim, and I’ve already made a couple (simple) batches of cheese. Soon will come yogurt and butter, hopefully. I’ve already had so much fun with them, a couple goats might be in my future.
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