The goat with a GSOH

We’re not kidding–the delightful and versatile English goat is making a deserved comeback, as Julie Harding learns from devotees

- Julie Harding

THERE is English tea, (full) English breakfast, the English language, an English summer (sometimes disappointing) and English mustard. Less well known, but equally as much fun, is the English goat, as Johanna Tavernor, secretary of the English Goat Breeders Association (EGBA), firmly believes. ‘My kids use me as a climbing frame,’ she says. ‘If I open the back door, my goats will come into the house and my billy, Millwind Gambit, once got totally stuck in the hay rack and had to be extracted by my husband.’

GSOH apart, the deer-like, eel-striped English goat has great presence and its ears stand to attention as if part of a military parade. With so many striking physical attributes, coupled with intelligence, politeness and curiosity, it is small wonder that this rare breed is on the up.

I screamed aarrgh in frustration and he gave the longest blaahh straight back

Similar specimens became rosette machines in late-19th-century show rings—Henry Stephen Holmes Pegler, who wrote The Book of the Goat, is pictured with one in 1872—but fast forward several decades and numbers have plummeted. The first EGBA folded through lack of interest and the last registered herd was disbanded in 1952. However, the English goat continues on the roller coaster of existence: from teetering on the edge of extinction, the past few years have seen such a surge in popularity that breeders have been forced to run waiting lists of purebred offspring for hopeful buyers.