Willy Wonka and the escaping goats

In the mornings we feed the goaties a little sugar beet with their lucerne after milking and they absolutely love it.  Bit like having chocolate sprinkles on top of your All Bran!  It comes in 25kg bags which we carry into the barn and split open into a feed trolley.  At the moment the manufacturer (presumably in an effort to sell more sugar beet) is offering a Willy Wonka type incentive ... a few 'golden tickets' are hidden in the sugar beet.  I have no idea what you would win - a year's supply of sugar beet?  A trip round the sugar beet factory (with all the goats)?  Who knows ... and I doubt that we will ever find out as we do not usually win anything.  But at least it makes opening your sugar beet sacks a little more interesting.  Knowing our luck though, we won't spot the golden ticket until it's disappearing into a goat's mouth!

So, having eaten all our breakfast, had lots of hay and a huge new bale of straw, the goats decided that they would go for a little wander.  I had just mixed the food for the little girls in a large wheelbarrow and had walked out of the barn to get the feed sacks out of the back of the truck.  As I turned round and headed back to the barn I was greeted by over 100 goats trotting out into the sunshine.  Seems that the gates that David repaired at the weekend didn't hold together too well.

I managed to shoo everyone back in and then, having told David off for not taking pictures last time this happened (and I wasn't there), I shot off a couple of pics on my camera.  You can get some idea of the chaos:

The crowd in the centre of the picture is eating the contents of my wheelbarrow

The same black goat that jumps in the hayrack!  On top of the lucerne bale.

It was as I was taking this second picture that I noticed in the distance young Marcie.  She was the only goat in season today and had taken herself off to go and see the big boys in the far barn in pursuit of romance.  So, I stopped taking pictures and ran over to grab her, just as Navajo was getting ready to shin over the gate to see her.  He could quite easily jump the gates (and has done so in the past) but I got her out of the way just in the nick of time.

I had got about half of them back in when David's parents happened to come out to the barn - so they managed to help me get everyone back in and repair the gates ...  Never a dull moment with goats.