 
A couple weeks ago, my boyfriend’s mother Miss Frances showed up with a big surprise. “Caroline?” her voice carried an odd note of excitement as she came into the house to fetch me. I listened carefully to the unfamiliar nuance in her soft Virginia drawl. Did I also hear a strange note of apprehension, of sheepishness, of guilt? Uh oh. “Caroline, come see what I’ve brought you!” I followed her outside, knowing instinctively, somehow, that this gift wasn’t going to be a sack of scuppernongs or a potted plant. “Oh Lord, Miss Frances, what did you do?” I asked nervously. “Shhhh!” she said as we approached her car. “They’re a little nervous. I got them at the auction in Aynor. Aren’t they adorable?” I peered into the back of the minivan and there they were... two little she-goats, bleating and trembling with the excitement of their big day. Now, we’ve already got ten chickens and a rooster, named after various family members (the Caroline hen is easily identifiable. She’s got a bad temper and an enormous breast.) We’ve already got an antisocial duck named Quackers. So a couple of goats? Well, why the hell not? “What will you name them, Caroline? I’m giving them to you, because we know what my son would do with ‘em if they belonged to him...” I snickered. “Oh yes indeed, Miss Frances. Before the first frost of the year, they’d end up butterflied and thrown on the grill.” Hugging her, I began to think about the subject at hand. “What a lovely surprise! What shall I call them?” We stood there, looking at the little animals. “How about Herpes and Chlamydia?” asked my wise-ass boyfriend, as he joined us under the Spanish moss. I gave him a dirty look. “Thelma and Louise?” “I was kinda leaning towards Hillary and Monica, actually,” I said. “But then we'd have to get a Paula goat, a Kathleen goat, and a Gennifer goat, too... at the rate poor Bill’s going, we’d have to get another one every couple of weeks or so.” Finally the little she-goats were christened Stella and Maggie, after characters in two of my favorite Tennessee Williams plays (“Goat on a Hot Tin Roof” and “On the Goaterfront”, of course.) Then came the fun part: how to keep ‘em healthy, happy, and out of harm’s way. The Truth About Goats and Chickens I don’t know a thing about goats. So what did I do? I looked on the Web, of course, and found the fabulous Cybergoats pages. This site contains a treasure trove of valuable information on fascinating topics like semen exchange and Fainting Goats, which certainly takes the prize for the most creepily named breed, doesn’t it? Cybergoats is also the home of the Goat Transportation Bulletin Board, as well as poignant first-person memoirs like “How Fluffy the Goat Saved Me From Certain Death When I Was Trapped Under My Tractor for 17 Hours In A Blizzard”. Best of all, this site is a part of the magical Goat Community Web Ring, a great resource for everything I’ll ever need to know about raising Stella and Maggie to be valuable, responsible members of the goat community. Web rings are a terrific idea; they provide “easy access to hundreds of thousands of member websites organized by related interests into easy-to-travel rings.” In other words, a web ring is kind of like a wagon train in which everybody’s headed in the same direction. From the exotic (“All about Hovawarts!”) to the frankly freakish (“Welcome to the Unicorn Friendship Center!), you can go to the Web Ring page to find the rest of your pack, herd, flock, gaggle, brace, or whatever. There are thousands of other pet-related sites, too. Pets.com is a great source of information on our little furry, scaly and feathered companions. Though you must register your name and e-mail address, this is a free discussion forum through which you can post, respond to, and review messages about many different types of pets. Netpets contains a wide variety of articles about different canine breeds. And the PetNet site about cats and dogs isn’t too bad either, though it’s a Pfizer-owned site and therefore a little more commercialized. If something goes wrong, there’s always the Virtual Pet Cemetery, where you can lay your pet to rest in the green rolling meadows of cyberspace, and mourn at the online grave of Heidi the Diabetic Schnoodle... Of course, Stella and Maggie will have been turned into goat burgers. SITES TO SEE
Cybergoats
Web Rings
Pets.Com Discussion Forum
Netpets (mostly canines)
PetNet
Virtual Pet Cemetery
Caroline Wright, of WRIGHT FOR YOU Word Services, is a freelance writer. A former resident of Hawaii, she now lives in rural South Carolina. Feel free to e-mail your comments to Caroline at cw@wrightforyou.com.
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