I am not in anyway meaning this in any form of degrading way or in any way making a pretense that I know better than anyone else. My lawyer told me to say that! Hee hee... Having said that in the bible times people would often have goats, sheep and I think cows together in one field. NOW HERE COMES THE KILLER QUESTION - How did they eat? These people were often nomadic did the goats have places to browse? Did the farmers tote hay around special for the goats, or special feed? Ok, and if they were not nomadic did they have all the grain and hay that we now use or did the goats just go ahead and graze.

Now if any of you have read Ken's posting on the Croatin ways of feeding animals, how would they feed them? If a goat has never had hay do they expect it? Now I do not mean eating grass hay which is cheap to find I am talking about the expensive hay that we buy for them. I would be the last one to starve an animal, I think they are getting better care sometimes than we are.

Does anyone know what goats ate back then? People seemed to eat pretty well.

-- Lynn (johnnypfc@yahoo.com), June 11, 2001

Answers

Lynn:

This is what I wrote up from my observation:

When driving through a nearby village I saw an older woman (babushka, apron and all) cutting grass along side of the road with a scythe. We stopped and asked if I could take her picture. When asked what she used the grass for, she said goats and invited me to her home to see her goats, which appeared to be Alpine (at least when I said Alpine she nodded and said ya, ya, ya, ya, ya – their version of yes). I would guess her age to be at least mid-70s, but she could sure push a wheelbarrow. Throughout the spring and summer she would gather several wheelbarrow loads each day. What wasn’t fed to the goats, weeds and all, was placed on a pile in the barn. I asked about the danger of mold from putting up basically unwilted grasses like that, but was told a little a day and adequate ventilation produced a nice, green hay for winter use without molding. Here again I was told the goats got eared corn, fresh grass or good (grass/weed) hay, garden trimmings and no purchased feed. No where did I see salt provided to animals and the idea of medicated feeds seemed to be unheard of.

About the only real difference is they don't coddle their animals like we do here. Now kind of wish I had brought back a stack cured hay sample for protein analysis.

-- Ken S. in WC TN (scharabo@aol.com), June 11, 2001.

Although these peoples were (and perhaps some still are) mostly nomadic, that doesn't mean that they didn't have permanent places to settle on a seasonal basis. Most locations only have browse available seanonally, so they would have to store up some kind of provision for the winter. I believe the nomadic part was that they followed food sources as the seasons changed and probably had a regular route they followed year after year, always returning to the same places every season, much as the Plains Indians once did in North America.

-- Skip Walton (sundaycreek@gnrac.net), June 11, 2001.

most nomads travel in a patteren, acording to what they need when its in season. My guess is they planted every year also,, just like the American Indians did,, then went back when the crop was ready

-- stan (sopal@net-port.com), June 12, 2001.

Well, there have been goatherds since time immemorial, who have taken their herds to wherever the grazing was best and stayed out to watch over them and fight off predators. If it is a nomadic tribe, they probably had their rotation routes worked out fairly well, or else they would have starved out.

Many places in Europe, such as Germany, Switzerland, etc. where people have been more settled have had rotational use of pasturage, and have cut grass hay for winter use when the goats are brought down from the summer pastures. It is a self limiting situation by how many animals the pasture can support without degrading.

Are you speaking of Biblical locations, perhaps? Wondering how the modern day desert/arid areas like Lebanon ever supported them? The lands used to be covered in trees, grass, and bushes. It has been seriously degraded and eroded by hundreds of years of human (and goat) overpopulations tearing down every stick of brush for firewood, the trees for building, and the goats tromping over it eating everything else.

-- julie f. (rumplefrogskin@excite.com), June 13, 2001.