Clochette
Date of Birth: 16/01/2017
Gender: Female
Gotcha Day: born at the sanctuary!
Breed: Alpine Goat
In the nearby village of Queyssac a goatherd was having issues with the mayor (who hates animals) as well as with his neighbours. The problem was that his goats would escape his property and eat the plants in the neighbouring gardens. Goats are very hard to keep in a field because they are incredibly agile and always find a way to jump over a fence or sneak their way out to eat bushes, roses, trees, and anything they can get their hooves on. So the mayor and the neighbours tried to sue him and forced him to give away half of his 70 goats.
The goatherd is a Jehova’s Witness who has never neutered his billy goats as he just wants to let nature happen as it should. Of course this means the goats kept breeding. What was only a handful of goats soon became an impressive herd.
He was in the newspapers and everyone spoke of the man who lost half his goat herd so we went to see if we could help him in any way. Needless to say he was overjoyed to hand us 10 goats. Two of them gave birth shortly after arriving, so that was twelve plus our own billy goat, Bucky. We went from having none to 13 goats in 3 months time.
The goats were all very wild and we could not touch them, they would even run away when they noticed our presence. Since the goatherd only had one hectare for all his goats, they were all quite skinny.
We put them in our forest, which they thoroughly cleared. When they were done eating the forest, a year and half later, they started jumping the fences to look for something else. The grass is always greener on the other side… In the summer they hang out in Fedj and Victor‘s field in the morning and as soon as it gets too hot they all run back inside the forest.
With food we managed to somewhat tame them. We still cannot pet them but at least they don’t fear us anymore. If there’s food involved, all the fear they might have of us seems to be temporarily put on hold to investigate whether said food might be for them. They will then come really close to us.
Clochette is Celine‘s daughter, she was one of two goats born at the sanctuary. We didn’t know two goats were pregnant so you can imagine our reaction when, one day, upon entering the loafing shed we spotted a little baby goat in the hay. Celine wasn’t even next to her, Clochette was all alone.
The next day, Clochette had disappeared. We looked for her everywhere but it was in vain. Someone suggested it might have been a fox who took her but we were very skeptical of this since we would have seen some blood. Bizarrely, Celine didn’t seem distressed by the fact her daughter was missing. She didn’t call her at all.
Four days later Clochette appeared out of nowhere, she was a lot thinner but seemed ok overall. We still do not know where she went or what happened to her, but we are obviously very glad she came back!