For Sale: Goat-O-Rama George

[Nanno]

George and Butterfly are actually rather quiet.  But Oscar and Felix (.25 alpine, .25 nubian, .5 tog) are rather loud.  Why?  Oscar and Felix were bottle babies and they're only loud if they see me come out of the house and they think I might just have a treat for them.  So its more about learned behavior in their case.  Barry Goatalo (.25 nubian, .75 alpine) started out a little loud as a baby because he was new and felt alone, but now he's huge and wonderful, and sounds like a sick cow softly moo-ing its last moo when he does make any noise.  What I hate are the real screamers that pull their cheeks back and belt out as loud as they can.  None of mine do that, thank goodness.

My only one who pulls his cheeks back and belts it out is Sputnik (5/8 Nubian), which in his case sounds more like a ROAR because it's so deep. He doesn't vocalize very often now that he's grown, but when he does decide to yell he raises the roof! It came in handy at Rendy 2017. The campfire was out when we went to bed but someone added paper to it and it started smouldering around 1:00 a.m. When Sputnik smelled smoke he screamed loud enough to wake the dead. As soon as I got up to fix the problem he settled right back down. Sputnik's mother was 1/2 Nubian and was the same way. She was usually quiet, but boy when she came into heat you could hear her scream from half a mile away: "I NEED A MAA-AA-AANN!!!"   

Our noisiest goat right now is Ziggy who is almost all Alpine, but she's basically a "bottle baby". Her mother rejected her so we had to go out several times a day and hold mama to let Ziggy nurse. She associated us with food right away and it made her extra super friendly, but she's also a lot more vocal when she sees us coming even though she's been weaned for quite a while now. I definitely think dam-raised kids are always quieter than bottle babies no matter what breed they are. The good news is that most of them grow out of it eventually. In general it seems like the Nubians don't necessarily talk more often than other goats, but when they do they are exceptionally LOUD. The crosses are a toss-up. About half of them inherit the Nubian voice and the other half sound like Alpines.