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What I Learned About Life From Buying a Goat on Craigslist
One goat became two, then a whole farm, then a crash course in what really matters
It started innocuously enough, as many modern tales do, with a Craigslist posting. Boredom and whimsy — that’s how my wife and I ended up driving home from Seguin, Texas, with a tiny Nigerian dwarf goat in the front seat of the car. We named her Bucket, and she lived — quite illegally, we would later learn — tucked behind the fence that surrounded our house in a rapidly gentrifying neighborhood of East Austin.
Very soon afterward, we got a second goat, Biscuit, having been told that goats get lonely by themselves. It was a sales pitch I am apparently quite susceptible to as it explains the two (human) boys currently taking a nap in the next room.
Within a year of buying the goats, we’d have a 17-acre ranch outside Austin. By the year after that, we’d own another 25 acres, a small herd of cows, two donkeys, geese, chickens, and a lake full of fish, in addition to the wild turkeys, boars, and foxes that roamed our property. We didn’t know it but in buying that goat we were being pulled by what Kimbal Musk, the brother of Elon Musk, has recently called the “extraordinary demand and desire to be a farmer amongst the younger generation.”
