When you have goats, you quickly learn that they don’t all come to you ready to be your best friend. Some goats arrive on the homestead already convinced that humans are pretty great. They walk right up, want treats, want scratches, and act like they’ve known you forever.
And then there are the skittish ones.
The ones who watch you from across the pen.
You try to talk to them.
You offer them a treat.
They stare at you like you’ve completely lost your mind.
Then they turn around and RUN like you’ve just announced you’re serving goat for dinner.
Getting a skittish goat to trust you can take a LOT of time and patience. You have to let them come to you. You can’t force it. Sometimes you make progress, and sometimes it feels like you’ve taken three steps backward.
And honestly, some goats may never completely come around.
So when you finally get through to one?
It is an absolutely amazing feeling. Belladonna came to us very skittish. She would watch me. She would look at me. She knew I was there.
But that was about it.
She wasn’t exactly lining up to come over and hang out with me.
Over the past year, I’ve spent a lot of time simply being around her, talking to her, and letting her learn that I’m not going to hurt her.
Then one day, something changed.
Belladonna came walking over and stood beside me.
My heart jumped.
This was a goat who had spent all this time keeping her distance from me, and suddenly she was standing there beside me like, Okay… maybe you’re alright.
And then she did something that made my heart stop altogether.
She turned her head…
…and gave me a kiss. ❤️🖤❤️🖤❤️
That little moment probably doesn’t look like much to someone else.
It’s just a goat giving a person a kiss.
But to me?
It was HUGE.
Because I know how far Belladonna has come.
I know how much time it has taken.
I know how many times I’ve sat there simply trying to earn a little bit of her trust.
And in that moment, she made the choice to come to me.
She chose to stand beside me.
She chose to let me get close.
And then she gave me a kiss.
I was over the moon
These are the moments that make all the work of having a homestead worth it. Not just the milk, the babies, the eggs, the gardens, or everything we produce.
It’s the relationships with the animals. It’s earning the trust of an animal that didn’t automatically trust you.
It’s watching a scared, unsure goat slowly realize that you’re safe. And maybe to some people, Belladonna walking over and giving me a kiss isn’t a big deal.
And that’s okay.
Because it doesn’t have to be a big deal to them. It was a big deal to me.
Not everyone needs to understand or appreciate the little moments that mean the most to me. Sometimes the sweetest moments are the ones that probably look completely ordinary to everyone else.
But I know what it took to get there.
I know the months of patience.
I know the quiet moments of simply letting Belladonna decide when she was ready.
And then, when she finally was ready, she came to me.
So Belladonna, that little kiss?
I’ll be keeping that one.
Because you may be just a goat, but you are a goat who finally decided that I was safe.
And there is something incredibly special about knowing that an animal who once kept her distance now chooses to come close.
That little kiss wasn’t just a kiss.
It was trust.
And Belladonna, I will treasure that trust for a very long time
Thank you for reading! Please share it would mean the world to me.
#mjbackyardingwithkids #PleaseShare #countryliving #GoatLove #belladonna #kisses
#friendswholoveyouwillnotbemean
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