Goat summer: It’s the greatest of all time

FALLS CHURCH, Virginia — They say what makes a neighborhood great is the people. That’s true most of the time. But sometimes it’s not the people. Sometimes, it’s the goats.

We moved to Falls Church , Virginia , this summer, and in our first weeks there, our backyard hosted a parade of neighborhood kids and occasionally their parents. The attraction was 44 goats and a llama — not a normal sight in a suburban cul-de-sac. We hired these ungulates in a desperate effort to reclaim a backyard so overgrown with vines that we didn’t even know what was back there.

By the time the goats finished devouring the leaves and most of the vines, along with some small trees, we discovered a car tire, a drone, and massive sections of tulip poplar. More importantly, we also learned something about our hooved friends — and maybe even about ourselves.

This is the story of four suburban days in June that none of us will ever forget.

My wife and I fled Montgomery County , Maryland , in the summer of 2022, and after two years of renting, we miraculously bought a house this year, in early June.

We had been looking for a fixer-upper because our child-to-available income ratio is pretty high. We need space more than we need niceness. For two years, we found nothing.

“There are no fixer-uppers around here,” one realtor told us, because such houses get torn down these days and replaced with McMansions. Instead, we found a house that is in very good shape on the inside, brand-new kitchen and bathrooms, but a bit unloved in the yard.

As soon as the owner accepted our offer, I became a changed man. I couldn’t think of anything but kudzu and how to get rid of kudzu.

Kudzu is known as “the vine that ate the South.” Introduced broadly to the United States by the New Deal, a conservation and makework project of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s supposedly to fight erosion, kudzu is a plague. The vines grow relentlessly, swallowing and killing all other vegetation. If we left the kudzu alone, it would swallow our home in a few years.

We had to clear it, but ordinary landscaping solutions wouldn’t work.

Hiring humans to clear the yard would be massively expensive, if we could get anyone to do it all. The kudzu was chest-high when we moved in, and the lawn was littered with all sorts of mysterious traps and objects. There was no way to “bush hog” or mow this mess. A weed whacker would be useless here, as the vines tangle around the spinning head.

It would take a platoon of men wielding machetes maybe a week to cut down the vines. While there was something appealing about having a dozen or so machete-men in my employ, the downsides to this approach were too great.

And then what to do with the cut vines? At one point, I tried to estimate the weight of the living, growing, entwining biomass in my backyard and then gave up. Hauling off these vines would take many truckloads. You couldn’t pile the vines up in some corner of the yard because they already filled the entirety of my yard about 4 feet high.

The couple of times I ventured into the kudzu, I referred to it as being “in the shit,” the term I learned from Vietnam War movies. Calling in aircraft to dump Agent Orange on my property was not an option.

Goats were obviously the right way to clear this yard, my wife and I concluded. Goats eat anything, and kudzu is a special treat for them. They don’t leave behind clippings. Instead, they convert the kudzu, through a multistage digestion process, into goat poop, which is small, dry, and odor-free.

We consulted with our new next-door neighbors, a family from our parish who had found us the house, and they agreed to go in with us on a goat rental.

I took special joy in this decision because I knew the goats would provide us with days of entertainment. We don’t live in the country, the exurbs, or even a spacious suburb. We are indisputably in the suburbs — we just happen to live on top of a steep hill, which gives us an odd-shaped half-acre slope as a yard.

Goats in the suburbs are a spectacle. For that reason, I believed they could bring the neighbors to us and kickstart what I had dreamed about in moving here: a community in which the domestic boundaries are slightly blurred and neighboring families connect seamlessly.

But I had my critics. A friend named Chris confronted me one day about my true motivations. He had been speculating on why I was bringing in goats, rather than a more conventional weed-control method: “I tell people you’re doing this because it will make a good article,” he told me. “And you can’t deny that’s why.”

Nonsense, I replied. Of course, I considered writing on the kudzu, especially the New Deal angle, but I didn’t think the goats would be much more than a detail in such a story. After all, I told Chris, “I think goats are fairly one-dimensional. I don’t think they’ll be compelling characters.”

I believed that because I hadn’t met the goats yet — and, in particular, because I didn’t know about Petrie, the unlikely leader of the goats.

After calling and emailing six goat providers, Jessica of Caprine Weed Eaters is the first goatherd to show up in person to give us an estimate. She says she can come on the second Thursday in June, less than a week after our closing and move-in.

News of Goat Day instantly spreads through the childful Irish-Catholic neighborhood that lies at the bottom of our hill. Moments after Jess and her brother pull the goat trailer into the cul-de-sac, the children and their adults begin climbing the hill.

As Jess and Andrew go about their work, neighborhood children appear one by one and three by three, from others’ backyards, from cars, from the road, from my own home — all to see the spectacle.

First, Jess and Andrew have to set up the barrier, which I would describe as a fabric electric fence.

Andrew, a ruddy fireman in his 20s, attracts some attention from the high school girls. “But his wedding ring was the second thing I noticed about him,” one girl would note later.

After an hour of prep work, Jess opens the back of the trailer, and out pour the livestock. A handful of baby goats stand dumbly and block the exit, like oblivious commuters on the Orange Line. Some goats sprint out of the trailer and hurry to the kudzu mass in the side yard. One, named Sugar, stops a few feet onto my front yard and begins nursing two baby goats.

I make it to the backyard, where most of the goats and human children have gone. The scene is mesmerizing.

The goats wander and move in a herd, or in a few smaller herds. The pattern is hard to detect because on this first evening, every single square foot is simply covered in kudzu. Why are they browsing at all? Are some leaves more choice? To get from spot to spot, they have to walk through yards of kudzu. They are walking on their food, with their food brushing against them, to get to food.

Some, especially the large ones, show a preference for the higher vegetation. In particular, there is one goat my wife and children call Caramel Cone. It’s a nickname that fits his beautiful colors, but if you know him, such a childish, drippy-sweet name does not match the man. Peregrine is this goat’s name.

Tall, thick, and athletic, like a 21st century linebacker , Peregrine is maybe the largest goat in the herd, and he has the highest reach. Commonly, you spot Peregrine towering high on his handsome hind legs eating the highest kudzu leaves on the vines or poaching some tulip poplar leaves from a branch.

While Jess and Andrew set up the solar panel to electrify the fence, I notice one goat, rather than following the herd, is hanging around the humans, acting less like labor than like management.

“This is Petrie,” Jess tells me. “He’s always the star of the show.” Petrie is a bit chunky — the only one I’d call overweight. “He thinks he’s in charge,” Jess laughs, and beholding Petrie, I laugh, too.

Then a neighbor’s dog barks. That’s when Ramona springs to action.

Ramona is the “livestock guardian.” She’s about 6 feet tall, with thick brown hair that looks like what would happen if a 7-year-old boy were to give a haircut to his 5-year-old brother. When she stares at you, with her massive brown eyes, she is a character at once imposing and ridiculous. I should mention that Ramona is a llama.

At the sound of this dog barking, she lets out a llama cry of some sort. All the goats flock behind her. The moment disturbs my understanding of animal nature. Nobody trained Ramona to protect goats. Nobody trained the goats to seek protection in Ramona’s shadow. These two different species of ungulates naturally adopt these roles. Compared to guarding her goats with dogs, Jess finds the llama more economical and certainly more comical.

It occurs to me throughout the whole goat-hiring process that I am paying to feed someone else’s goats. About 44 goats for most of a week adds up to at least $500 in goat-feeding, with some estimates putting the number at $1,000. But Jess is putting in a lot of labor, including a lot of driving.

Also, she has a regular salaried job.

“This is my retirement plan,” she tells me. Jess and Andrew work together full time as firefighters in the same fire department. The goat business is a side hustle at the moment, but it is clearly more than a business proposition. It’s a labor of love.

When Jess visits on Friday, there isn’t much work for her to do. It seems she just wants to spend time with the goats. I don’t blame her. Every child in the neighborhood evidently does, too.

The goats are two different breeds: Boers (stockier, mostly white with brown heads) and Nubians (sleeker, and more varied in color).

The oldest are 3 or 4 years old, while the youngest are less than a month old. I ask Jess, “So had we rented your goats a couple of weeks ago, we could have had goat labor and delivery in our backyard?”

“Oh yeah,” Jess says. “Those goats were born in a client’s yard.”

Suddenly, it crosses my mind how goat babies are made, and I worry that this might happen in front of all these children. “Umm, when are they in heat?” I ask Jess.

September through April, she explains, so we should have a celibate backyard in June.

How managed is the breeding?

“I try to manage it all,” she says, before noting delicately the goats' disinterest in being managed in this regard. While she separates the bucks and does in mating season, “sometimes goats get out. Sometimes goats get in.”

A bit later, I inform my wife about the goat promiscuity, and she gasps. Then she chuckles. “Imagine if we woke up to those noises in the middle of the night.”

It’s a beautiful innocence my bride possesses, assuming the goats would be discreet enough to wait until the cover of dark before mating. I believe this is straight out of the book of Proverbs: Even her bawdy jokes are too innocent.

Eating, eating, eating, is the sound we hear on the nights we sleep with our windows open. When the Route 50 traffic and the neighborly chatting have all gone to bed, you can hear the goats munching away. In the quiet of a suburban summer night, it’s a surreal sound.

The other sound we hear, from time to time, is goat farts — mostly from Petrie.

In the morning, I walk out to the yard, and it’s more of the same. Eating, eating, eating. I wonder, do they have pastimes, or is their life simply eating, mating, and digesting?

In a few minutes, I get the answer. As I’m admiring the girth of Petrie, I notice him lose interest in the kudzu. He looks around and presumably beholds what I behold: approximately 43 goats just munching away.

Nearby is another goat, and so Petrie drops his head and simply rams him. And then he rams him again. Maybe it’s play. Certainly it’s an attempt to display or establish dominance. “He’s not exactly going for crew cohesiveness,” Jess says.

But this isn’t just Petrie being ornery. “Butting,” as it’s called, is their sport. In the next couple of days, as the kudzu jungle thins and some open spots appear, butting takes up more and more of their time.

A few years back, the previous owner took down a massive tulip poplar, probably about 13 feet in circumference, and left most of the trunk lying across the backyard. You wouldn’t have it known it looking at my yard on Thursday — it just looked like an undulation in the sea of kudzu.

But after two days of goats eating, the giant tree is exposed, if still tied down by kudzu vines, like Gulliver amid the Lilliputians.

As soon as the yard has features, around Saturday morning, the giant poplar is the central feature. The poplar stretches about 50 feet, pointing back and downhill toward a dark corner of the yard.

The base of the trunk, hollow and gaping toward the house, sits smack in the center of my yard, at something of a high point. There, the trunk is about 5 feet high.

This central peak becomes coveted territory for resting goats, and the grand dead poplar becomes the central battleground: the butting ground.

The kids get on the smaller logs that litter the yard and gaily butt one another off. Some of the fully grown goats also use these smaller logs for butting wars. But the real big boys fight over the grand poplar.

On Sunday evening, as the whole yard is blessed with shade, a brown and spotted Nubian goat named Brego rests at the apex of the poplar when Peregrine takes notice. Peregrine and Brego are twins — two of triplets, in fact. Peregrine mounts the poplar nimbly, and his little brother gets excited, running up and down the trunk.

Then the fraternal battle begins. Brego sprints to the high ground, chased by Peregrine. He rears up on his hind legs repeatedly and smashes his skull into Peregrine’s. Peregrine, unfazed, pushes past, takes the high ground and then rears up, nearly vertical, touring over his twin. He smashes down — boom! Then again. Soon, Brego stumbles, almost slips off, and saves face by hopping off the poplar.

In the cool of this evening, with little foliage left to graze, a large group of goats, young and old, turn their attention to butting wars. The grand poplar is center court, and Peregrine, larger, more dexterous, and simply more aggressive, holds it as long as he wants it.

The other goats take turns challenging him, which requires climbing up on this poplar. During one fight, I notice an adult brown and white goat trying to mount the poplar trunk at the lowest part but failing. It’s Petrie.

Petrie was born prematurely in the spring of 2021. Like Peregrine, Brego, and their sister, Petrie was born a triplet. He was the smallest and weakest. He couldn’t even move.

“His mother abandoned him,” Jess tells me.

The first time Jess says that, while she and Andrew set up the fence, the full weight of it doesn’t hit me. I picture the mother wandering off when Petrie was young. The truth is grimmer: Petrie’s own mother chose to raise his siblings and left him for dead.

So Jess and her family adopted Petrie. He was tiny — they would hold him in a single hand — and helpless. “We didn’t think he’d live,” Jess’s mother tells me. “I wanted to let him die out of mercy.”

But they bottle-fed Petrie, not sure what was in store. “We’ve had goats bigger than him who didn’t make it,” Jess says. “But his will to live was so great.”

He made it onto his feet, and soon he was prancing about. Jess’s German shepherd took in Petrie and would lick him clean. The other goats, not so much. “He didn’t assimilate with the goats right away. It was heartbreaking,” Jess says.

Petrie’s preference for Jess’s company, like the stories of him escaping and trying to get in the house, takes on a different meaning in this light. He was unloved by his mother and then unloved by his peers. “He’s a real loner,” Jess’s mother says on the night she visits. In the next breath, she adds, “He’ll protect Jessica.”

This runt who was left for dead is fierce. “I think he could handle the herd without Ramona,” Jess half-jokes.

The neighborhood children all think his name is “Peach Tree.” In truth, Jess named Petrie after a pterodactyl in The Land Before Time. But I assumed he was named Petri, like petrus, Latin for rock. In my mind, this is Boer-Nubian Rocky.

On Sunday night, though, I watch him fail even to enter the ring dominated by Peregrine, who was named after a much sleeker and more fearsome avian creature.

As a couple of neighborhood children take in these fights, I tell them the goats’ stories as I’ve learned them from Jess and her mother. “So Petrie thinks he’s the alpha,” one boy says. “But it looks like Peregrine is.”

About that moment, Peregrine strolls up and down the log after another win. I notice Petrie has placed his front hooves on the middle of the grand poplar. It’s a tougher climb at this point from the yard to the trunk than the climbs he failed earlier today. Peregrine ignores him.

But Petrie’s will conquers the physics of the matter. With one desperate, or hopeful, bound he gets his girthy body on the tree.

Peregrine has ambled down to the lowest end of the tree, and when he pivots to walk back up, he eyes this surprising new rival. I’m already happy for Petrie: Like Rocky, just getting in the ring with The Champ is an accomplishment in itself.

The other goats seem to gather around to watch the “star of the show” battle The Champ.

Peregrine and Petrie were born the same spring and were each one of triplets. The similarities end there. Peregrine is a purebred Nubian. Petrie is a mutt. Peregrine is the largest of his siblings, and Petrie’s largeness is neither in length (the X axis) nor in height (the Y axis) but in the Z axis.

Peregrine steps toward Petrie and lowers his head. Petrie drops his head, too. They butt. Then Petrie turns tail and starts retreating toward the high end of the poplar.

Peregrine follows on his heels and drapes his chin over Petrie’s back, a common mammalian expression of dominance. When Brego tries to remount the poplar, Peregrine turns around deftly, rears up, and chases him away.

With the one-on-one restored, the two butt heads again. Peregrine knows how to finish this. He taunts Petrie one more time with his chin and strides past him to get to the high ground. The act of arrogance proves a crucial mistake.

Petrie can’t rear up as high or strike down as fiercely as Peregrine. But like a rock, he can throw his weight around. As Peregrine’s center of gravity passes Petrie’s ample rump, the former runt hip-checks his sleek rival. Peregrine’s athleticism is worth nothing now. Like a little kid getting butted off a log, Peregrine falls, helplessly into the yard.

The Champ is down!

As the sun rises the next morning, I make coffee and head straight to my back deck. By the twilight’s first gleaming, Petrie still stands as the king of the hill. The others come and challenge him. They’re often bigger and always more agile, but Petrie butts them, shoves them, and even mounts them. Sometimes he fights two at a time.

Petrie finishes off another Nubian as the sun’s rays hit the poplar. That’s when Peregrine comes back.

This time, the onetime champ won’t get cheated. He gets the high ground, he uses his height and athleticism to smash his skull into his rival’s repeatedly.

With one violent smash, the two knock one another off the grand poplar and into the yard. At ground level, amid the leafless kudzu vines, the battle goes on and on.

Over time, Petrie doesn’t grow more tired — he grows bolder. Peregrine never gives an inch. The goat crowd dissipates. The fight isn’t about dominance anymore. They battle each other because they know they are the two best. This is now a butting war of respect, even friendship — both of which were hard-earned.

This abandoned baby, bottle-baby, awkward mutt clearly is more than accepted by the herd.

I was right about the goats but also wrong about them.

Hiring them was absolutely correct on the score of weed control. Not a single kudzu leaf or poison ivy leaf remained within reach of the enclosure. They even exfoliated the bamboo they could reach.

But I was wrong about the goats as characters: They aren’t one-dimensional. (Neither was the llama. At one point, when my oldest daughter was about 10 feet from the fence, Ramona spit on her.)

When Jess arrives to collect the goats after four days, her mother comes, along with Jess’s son.

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“I want to write a children’s book about Petrie,” she says.

A hundred strangers, upon learning I write books, tell me that they intend to write a book. It’s almost never a good idea. But I encourage this idea. Heck, maybe I’ll write it with them.

Timothy P. Carney is a senior political columnist for the Washington Examiner.