goats pg 3 6-27-24
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Guess who came to lunch? Guests with personality and 4 legs
By Linda Lemmon
Town Crier Editor
PUTNAM — Well those were interesting “guess who’s coming to lunch” guests.
David Pietrowski brought two of his 10 goats to the Putnam Public Library, adding a bit of entertainment for the kids at the town’s outside Summer Lunch Program.
Visiting kids hung out around the fence under the big tent and peppered Pietrowski with questions. Many kids had never seen a goat up close and personal.
The adventure began in 2020, he said, when his wife said she wanted a goat. They found four through Instagram. His wife, Monica Pietrowski, loves goats so much, she was fully prepared, having researched everything about goats.
So during a blizzard she noticed that one of the goats was making “funny noises,” Monica knew what that meant. Boom, baby goat. Their stable of goats went from four to six and now 10.
Sometimes the baby goats would come into the house. Sometimes they wear diapers, sometimes not. Goats like to climb but they hate rain or wet things, he said.
He called it goat math which is kind of like “chicken math” when you have five and then suddenly you have 50. “Yes, it’s a lot like chicken math,” he said.
Besides providing entertainment with their antics, goats are great at clearing land. They eat most weeds and little trees and even poison ivy. One adult asked if they rented out the goats to get rid of poison ivy and Pietrowski said no “because then we can’t hug them” when they come back.
Even the names are fun. They have a “funny mix of names.” He said his wife gives the goats French names like Jacques, Celeste and Gigi and he gives them names like Spike and Vader.
Even their eyes are interesting. They have horizontal pupils which caught the eyes of many of the kids. Interesting, but also useful. The horizontal pupils allow the goats to check a wider horizontal range for predators.
“They’re big loveable doofuses, basically,” he said.
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