The Lonely Goatherd

Joseph's new favorite part of the San Diego Zoo is the children's petting zoo. Specifically, the goats at the petting zoo.

During our first visit to the goats, Joseph decided that they needed some extra-help with their breakfasts, so he started hand-feeding the goats.


I thought that his duck-feeding experience earlier this year (when an anxious duck bit him) had traumatized him, but Joseph seemed to have put that behind him as he shoved little fistfuls of leaves into the goats' faces.


Fortunately, these goats weren't as impatient as the ducks at the Wild Animal Park; they seemed to enjoy having someone do the work of getting the individual leaves off of the branches.


We spent a good half hour feeding them without a single goat ever biting Joseph. This is pretty remarkable considering that Joseph's death grip on the leaves--which he fed to them one at a time--often only left a tiny bit of green sticking out of his fists.


Each feeding followed the same routine: Joseph would pick a leaf, select a goat and then force his hands towards the general area of the goat's mouth (i.e., nose, eyes, or neck). The goats wouldn't realize what was going on at first, but eventually they'd take aim at Joseph's darting offering.

After a few seconds of reaching out and missing Joseph's never-quite-stationary hand, the goat would eventually get a hold of the leaf. Joseph would hold on for a brief second and then snap his hand back, rub his own tummy, and then look up beaming proudly and say "mmmm!!!"


The cycle then repeated itself for 30 minutes.



Here are a couple videos of the scene:

I love this first video because of his little nod after the goat takes his leaf, and because Joseph takes the branches of leaves away from the goat so that he can pluck off a single one to feed the goat.

I love this next video because I think he imitates me and Erin when we try to get him to eat his meals by saying, "Eat some more. It's yummy!"

Here, Joseph comes up to the goat and says "yum!" The goat ignores him so he says "more! more!" as he shoves the leaves towards the goat's face.

When we went back for a second visit to the goats, there weren't any fresh branches out, so Joseph dug around in the dirt for old leaves to feed the goats. With a little extra coaxing, the goats even ate some of the dirty old leaves, which pleased Joseph.

We're still looking into local pre-schools to see which ones are feeders for the more selective goatherd prep-schools. Otherwise we don't really see how he'll ever get into an ivy-league animal husbandry program.