{"id":105339,"date":"2026-10-16T03:00:27","date_gmt":"2026-10-16T07:00:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=105339"},"modified":"2026-10-14T17:34:20","modified_gmt":"2026-10-14T21:34:20","slug":"clarksons-goats","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/clarksons-goats\/","title":{"rendered":"Clarkson’s … goats"},"content":{"rendered":"

I started watching Clarkson’s Farm<\/em>, although I got interrupted after a few seasons so I haven’t caught up to the most recent season. On X, Sama Hoole<\/a> talks about the goats Jeremy Clarkson recently added to the farm:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Jeremy Clarkson switched on an electric fence so his goats could get used to it, and a goat gets used to a fence the way it gets used to anything, by testing it until it gives.<\/p>\n

Lizzie, the goat farmer he bought them from, warned him they would be out, and she was right. A sheep accepts a fence. A cow leans on it and thinks. A goat regards it as a question somebody has asked, and answers.<\/p>\n

They had been bought for the half of Diddly Squat no tractor can touch, a bank of bramble and thorn that would take a man with a brushcutter all week. The goats went on it, and in Clarkson’s own words one bramble bush was in real trouble inside five minutes.<\/p>\n

Nothing else on four legs can do this. A goat would rather eat a hedge than a lawn. The mouth is small and the lip is split, so it picks a leaf out from between two thorns the way you would pick out a splinter. It stands on its hind legs for the top of the hedge. It leans on a sapling until the crown comes down. It eats gorse, strips bark, chews through leaves that cattle and sheep spit out, and comes back in the morning for the regrowth.<\/p>\n

Oakland keeps a herd on its hillsides against the fires. Portugal pays shepherds to walk goats through its mountains before the summer burns. The firebreak that saved the Reagan Library in 2019 had been chewed that spring. Network Rail has put them on the cliffs at Folkestone.<\/p>\n

The oldest farm animal there is, 10,000 years in the job, is being rediscovered as green technology, and in all that time it has learned nothing about fences.<\/p>\n

The thicket goes in one end and comes out the other as kids and milk.<\/p>\n

Clarkson’s land agent has never once told him a goat was a sound investment. The goats have never once asked him.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I started watching Clarkson’s Farm, although I got interrupted after a few seasons so I haven’t caught up to the most recent season. On X, Sama Hoole talks about the goats Jeremy Clarkson recently added to the farm: Jeremy Clarkson switched on an electric fence so his goats could get used to it, and a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[4,65,28],"tags":[924,1306],"class_list":["post-105339","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-britain","category-environment","category-media","tag-farming","tag-jeremyclarkson"],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-rp1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/105339","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=105339"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/105339\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":105341,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/105339\/revisions\/105341"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=105339"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=105339"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=105339"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}