Julia and I have an unusual life.

We reside in a 24-foot trailer. Our home cannot have a foundation because our job requires us to be mobile, to live on the land where we are working. We are often away from the power grid, and so we rely on an 80-watt solar panel for all of our power. This might not seem like a lot of power, and, in our age of energy abundance and inefficiency, its not (a typical incandescent light bulb is all that this can run). We manage, however, to get by pretty effectively. We can run our technological gadgets (laptops, cell phones, ipods) and still have enough power left over for some non-essential items like the fan on our propane heater and the water pump.

The primary responsibility that Julia and I have is to the land where we are working. We work towards the goals of the landowner, or manager, who hires us. The tool that we employ to handle this responsibility is a herd of 600 goats. My language of description is key here. The easy way to describe our job is to call us goat herders. I think that this is somewhat misleading because it implies that our emphasis is on the goats entirely. We are trying to move away from the dominant paradigm in land management which considers animals as separate from the land, or as an influence that only fouls or spoils it. Our goats work with succession, manage plant species, adjust soil profiles, and change the way in which the ecosystems function. That is the basic story of our job. I hope to use other blogs to talk more about the specifics of how the goats work with the land.

The one goat that I want to talk about, however, is a goat that violates some of the rules of our job. This goat not only has a unique personality, but she is one of the few goats with a name: Sadie. She often acts in quirky ways that are, for lack of better description, “very un-goat like”. We use dogs to control our goats. Kodi , Bailey, and a rotating cast of dogs from our boss Lani, help us control where the goats are at any given time. The goats respect the dogs, moving in unison when the dogs get into their flight zones. Sadie does not. I think the dogs respect Sadie. She doesn’t put up with their intimidations and frequently fights back, chasing them away when they get too close. She sleeps outside of our trailer. If we are not careful to close the screen door, she lets herself in to snack on whole oranges and bananas and pull calendars off the wall to see how they taste. We even have to tie her up while we feed the dogs because her relentlessly diverse appetite has given her a taste for dog food. No dog can get to his or her bowl with an un-tethered Sadie nearby. Why do Julia and I put up with such an unruly goat? She feeds us. Sadie is part milk goat, part family member, and all of the reason why I find the wires on our solar panel pulled out on a morning when I have gotten up later than Sadie thinks she should be milked.

One of the things that make goats (including Sadie), and other four-legged, cloven-hooved animals special in their relationship to our ecosystems is their eating habits and the way that they process what they eat. Sadie puts the local vegetation and citrus peels through a four-stomached digestion factory and turns in into delicious milk. The first and most distinctive aspect of this factory is the rumen, the chamber where fermentation of masticated plant material takes place. When a goat, sheep, or cow is chewing their cud they are actually chewing regurgitations from their rumen. In a goats world, this regurgitation might be enjoying the taste of a particularly good piece of sagebrush a few hours after grazing. The human analogue to this behavior is reflection, or rumination, the process of recalling the events of our lives after they happen to us. In fact, the thesaurus, under ruminate, has "chew over" listed. So, when I was thinking about, or chewing over, the web address for this blog about goats, ecology, and life I thought I found an appropriate one: www.rumen-ations.blogspot.com.

I wish you all well.

Jon and Julia