Stigma

Stigma against goats has disappeared in the Western Division. However, the system at the scale of the Western Division cannot be separated from other parts of Australia. In line with systems thinking that constitutes the basis of this inquiry, a system at a particular scale does not exist in a vacuum (Folke et al., 2010) and researchers or managers should not ‘lose sight of the important relationships that bind each subsystem to the others and to the higher levels of the hierarchy’ (Meadows, 2008:84). Stigma around goats will be discussed with this way of thinking in mind.

Unmanaged goats can have a significant negative effect on biodiversity and resources and are among the most stigmatised animals in Australia. Australian producers, mostly those from Anglo-Saxon background, have traditionally been sheep and cattle farmers for many generations:

Well, I think it’s just historic and cultural … I can remember someone from Wellington, when I first said I was going to farm goats, being very condescending about them. They were considered pests, or whatever. It’d sort of be like farming wild pigs or something. They’re just historically not eaten in Australia. Which was pretty well Anglo-Saxon up until a generation ago. (P5, saleyard)

The following participant highlights the fact that ethnic groups are slowly changing the dynamics of goat farming:

The basic problem is a prejudice by the dominant Anglo population against anything to do with goat. You will never crack that because your grandmother taught you it will never change. That is being improved somewhat by ethnic groups and there’s no question goat is now sold domestically to quite a few of those people but it’s always going to be small. (P7, producer/breeder/breeder)

However, in the last few years, some sheep producers have acknowledged the value of goats:

Also getting back to that traditional stigma. The sheep people in particular. Now I’ve been here for 15 years. The chap over the road has got 3,500 acres of wilderness, and he said to me in the first three to four months that I’ve been here, he said, look …, I confess, I don’t like goats, but I can see what an amazing job they’re doing, and yet he hasn’t taken it on-board and neither have any of the neighbours. (P11, producer/breeder)

The powerful influence of mentalities and stigmatised perception of goats highlighted in these quotations are passed down from generations of producers:

I suppose every farmer’s grown up that you’ve got your pest animals and you've got your other animals and the goat’s always been in the pest animal besides your rabbit … it gets passed on by the generation. District said it was a pest so it’s a pest. (P15, producer)

The stigma is often much stronger with multi-generation families that have been here whereas newcomers have no issue at all with them and will easily see them as a positive from day one. (P19, producer)

We’ve grown up eating beef and lamb. People say, ‘You eat goat meat?’ It’s just a perception. We eat goat here, not very often but every now and then we eat goat. I quite like it but if I had a choice, I’d eat lamb. (P9, processor)

There are many misconceptions about goats that arise from experiences that are not based on facts. These misconceptions often extend beyond producers and farming communities to the general public and, in some instances, to policymakers and government bodies.

I would say, that’s only a small part of the stigma. I think a large part of the stigma is that—it’s interesting, people perceive goats as animals that will eat anything, including garbage out of the garbage pan, washing off the line, and it’s just been, you know—to a degree that stupid cartoon image. They also perceive goats as escape artists. Well no-one says anything about the lambs that are out on the side of the road, when you drive through country roads. No-one says anything about the cattle that are out on the roads, but if one goat gets out on the road, the whole population of goats are branded. (P11, producer/breeder)

Although goats can consume plant material that other livestock avoid, people often believe that goats are capable of consuming any plant material available. However, there is evidence that goats are selective and avoid some plants and shrubs in the Australian rangelands. Further, their contribution to range degradation has not yet been conclusively documented and they are often only part of the problem, in addition to other wild and

domestic, native and feral herbivores. These topics will be discussed in detail in Chapter 8.

This stigma goes beyond the goat to include the goat producer. Some sheep producers consider anyone who produces goats as a second-class farmer; they conceive goats as the poor cousin of sheep and perceive themselves as socially superior. The following few quotes address this idea:

Some people said that until today, there are some producers who think that goat producers are sort of, it’s an old folk thinking really, that if you’re a goat farmer you’re not farmers and that the goat is the poor cousin of the sheep. I get stuck with that. (P9, processor)

People in this country, you know, it’s the old, Australia used to ride on the sheep’s back, you know. People with goats are seen as a poor cousin of the sheep farmers, you know … There’s a social stigma of being the poor cousin of the sheep farmer. (P17, saleyard)

The goat industry still has a stigma around it. People don’t want to be seen as a goat farmer, they think that’s a degrading term and all that type of thing; this is the Australian mentality. But, the more and more that the goat shines as a beacon of returns for the grazier, it will be the goat farmer wearing the tie. (P12, processor)

My neighbour with the 50,000 acres: people tell a little story about him. Years ago, because you’re the big-wheel grazier in the district, and the wool grower and cattle breeder, you didn’t want to be seen driving a trailer load of goats into the depot. So, he’d get someone else. He’d call someone on the telephone. ‘Can you come and take a trailer load of goats in for me?’ so people didn’t see him driving in with it. (P24, producer)

This negative attitude towards goats varies between states and regions. As mentioned previously, in the Western Division, this stigma does not exist anymore, as other producers and the community realise that goats generate valuable income, especially in times of hardship:

People can see there is an income. So, if they see a mob, they collect it and harvest them and bring them in. It’s making their businesses more sustainable. We will hopefully keep moving into that more mature industry. (P12, processor)

There’ll always be snobs here, regardless of where you are. But I think that once they see the returns on investment that are coming in ... it’s not the poor cousin, it might be the rough cousin from the west, but he’s a long way from being poor. (P22, GICA/producer)

Many participants from the Western Division reiterated that goats enabled them and other people to stay on their lands in times of hardship:

There’s no doubt that the government side of things is well behind what the general communities feel. Especially in some of the western areas if there wasn’t a goat industry there wouldn’t be people, full stop out there … Even sheep farmers and croppers now they see goats as an annoying thing, especially if they’ve got a crop of wheat down or something and goats come in. However, they do see them as a source of income and a lot of people start putting it in their budgets as well. So, in that sense the communities have accepted them. (P13, producer)

The following participant agrees and adds that current prices are changing peoples’ minds:

They’ve been and gone, I think, those sorts of people. Now that the goat is a profitable item now, they don’t mind the goats now … Some of the figures that people are turning outweigh their sheep incomes. And it’s not chicken feed. It’s a lot of money for people who are harvesting goats, and have a half-managed program where they put them into a paddock; and if they know the nanny’s going to kid they’ll let them kid and give them six weeks and then take the nannies away and the kids will rear themselves. There’s quite a lot of that. Or, they’ll let them go after they’ve been born on the place, and they don’t tend to just walk off. They’ll tend to hang around. A lot of people are doing that. They keep an eye on them. (P23, producer)

Another misconception is that goats jump over fences. The reality is that they dig under, rather than jump over, fences. Some participants noted that a goat fence is similar to a sheep fence:

Fencing that will hold cross bred ewes should generally hold goats. The quickest way to set up fencing is to run hinge joint, and I’ve done miles and miles of it on my own. It’s relatively easy. You hook a roll up and you tie a role to the strainer post, put it on a trailer, hook it up and drive away, and strain it up and belt it on. So that’s not a hard thing to do, and hinge joint is something that a lot of sheep people have anyway. (P11, producer/breeder)

Another participant agreed and noted that the misconception that goats jump over fences is not true:

This is a big myth. People talk about the huge fencing that goats require. We’ve never found that at all. We use perfectly ordinary hinge joint fencing, normal height with a barb on the top. We never have any troubles. (P7, producer/breeder)

The only difference is the need to reinforce the lower section of the fence. The following three participants agreed:

The fencing definitely needs to be secure, as goats are opportunists … they will go under. (P11, producer/breeder)

So, their first line of escape is under the bottom wire … So, you have to concentrate on the bottom of your fence not on the top of your fence. Even though every goat advisor will tell you that goats jump. (P7, producer/breeder)

We looked at the fences that some of the goat breeders that we knew had, and decided that what was standard in this district for sheep, was quite satisfactory. So, we put up the standard sort of fence, that has you know, a barbed wire at the top, and you know then the—I’ll have to check on what you call the square— the other type of netting—John will tell me. Nothing special. No, no, no. It’s really about six strands of wire with the top ones a bit wider than the lower ones, because the lower ones stop the kids getting through the fences. (P3, producer)

In most cases, crossing and damaging fences is wrongly attributed to goats. Some participants have flagged other animals as the main problem:

Our biggest competitor is the kangaroo. They have the opportunity to jump over, but for some reason they just seem to like to sit there and dig. And it doesn’t take too long for one or two roos to have a dig, and then the next one comes along and makes it a bit deeper, and all of a sudden, you’ve got an opening for goats … With this weather, we’ve been having a lot of the fences popping up. The roo goes through and just keeps rising it and rising it. You could have 30 m of fence that’s ten inches high. The roos just tell each other where it is and away they go. (P23, producer)

Wombats also seem to be problematic with regard to fences:

Wombats are a problem. That’s another problem that the government refuses to recognise. Wombats are in plague proportion and are causing a lot of damage on our creek frontages and so on. Erosion—when there’s a flush of water coming down the creek, but again like the—you know, I could get really worked up about this—the perception that our native kangaroos are at risk, is just so ridiculous. They are causing so much damage and they’re in plague proportion. Well I’d have to say, you see a lot of dead wombats on the road these days, and that’s an indication of their population. They cause a lot of trouble with fencing. (P11, producer/breeder)

These quotations clarify that, although goats require solid fencing, particularly in lower sections, the conception about the need for extra high fences to hold them is unrealistic. They also clearly indicate that wild native herbivores are often more problematic, which

means that a sound fence that holds goats in a paddock might at least partially prevent entry of wild herbivores inside these paddocks.

In brief, without ignoring the potential negative effects of goats if left unmanaged, the pest paradigm is both influencing and influenced by many misconceptions and stigmatised ideas of the animal. This constitutes one of the main challenges facing goat producers and associated stakeholders in the industry.