Compiled with the help of artificial intelligence, based on Spanish-language information. Source below the article.
The goat: humanity’s best friend
The goat is man’s best friend, and woman’s too. I’d go as far as to say it’s the best friend of all humanity. It’s small, soft, furry, so gentle to the touch you could almost eat it up. It doesn’t bite or bark, and it doesn’t do its business in the street—it does that in its own pen. It’s so discreet that it never wanders into supermarkets or tracks muddy footprints through the house. It’s respectful and knows its limits. Its owners do, too. For this reason, and many more, it makes the ideal pet. You can keep one on your rooftop terrace or balcony—there are no empty plots of land left these days.
On the rooftop where I was born, we kept goats that gave us milk. It was a familiar, necessary creature with a clearly defined role. Admittedly, they sometimes ate the washing, newspapers and cardboard, and the experts (Juambi) say they can be stubborn, a bit annoying and rather envious. But apart from that, they were well worth their keep.
An economic and emotional asset
These days you can’t buy bundles of alfalfa at the shops, and animal feed is dreadfully expensive. However, the price of cheese and goat meat more than makes up for it. It’s true that goats cause a lot of erosion, but in their defence I must say that a goat is an affectionate, warm, earnest and honest soul. It knows how to listen and doesn’t bother the neighbours. Its offspring, the kids, are very well-mannered, even if they do skip about from time to time—but that’s only natural at their tender, very tender age.
A lost Christmas tradition
At Christmas, eating kid was a Canarian tradition, until it fell out of fashion because supermarkets came along with their freezers and frozen prawns of all sizes, which won plenty of devotees. Television showed us what other nations ate, and like fools we decided that foreign food was more sophisticated, more distinctive and less rustic. Then came the shrimp cocktail. Our poor animals fell so far out of favour that even a military man managed to take the name Puerto Cabras away from us, and nobody has been able to restore it to this day. Cowards. So typically Canarian in some ways, yet so spineless in others. Incidentally, the Spanish Legion doesn’t have a goat for a mascot—it has a ram.
The tradition fell into such disuse that the very word “baifo” (kid) was consigned to obscurity. That’s why those of us who fight tooth and nail to preserve our own words for our own things now have to thank Quevedo, the singer, for making this surviving piece of Guanche vocabulary popular among the younger generation.
The smell of identity
Global failure promotes the “kilometre zero” approach—buying local, in other words—but that means accepting the conditions of production and processing, along with the waste and the smells. Goats give off distinctly local aromas, and over time, that scent becomes an ingrained part of our identity. The more refined types may like it less, but they’ll just have to get drunk on it. The smells of the countryside don’t come from flowers alone, especially when the wind turns southerly and wafts the warm aroma of goat, billy goat and kid manure up the hillside and across the valley. It’s so endearing and striking, that incomparable smell, that I’m convinced one day some white settler—the kind they call “residents”, who pay to take goats for walks and whisper in their ears—will market a goat eau de cologne. And they’ll claim it has magical properties that transport you to the pre-Hispanic Pleistocene, to the authentic time that intrepid tourist curiosity craves.
This goat cologne will come with added value and a touch of “eco-chic” design, halfway between extravagant and eccentric, with an indigenous yet effortlessly bohemian twist to ensnare you come summer. They’ll also say they invented goat cologne, but that’s not true: I hold the patent. And I’ll fight them in the courts over its designation of origin. It shall be called “Eau de Cologne de Chèvre”.
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