So I was fixing myself a salad for lunch, as I am wont to do lately (and with homegrown tomatoes!) and it occurred to me that Elvis the goat might be interested in the scraps.

He didn’t like vegetable scraps when I first brought him home, but he was just a baby then. He’d look at them funny and leave them in his bowl until they shriveled up into nothing. But since he’s developed a true gourmet’s taste, sampling such items as the rose bush, all the shrubbery, the dog food, and lawn weeds, I thought that he might enjoy a little goat salad.

So he got all of the veggie offal; the ugly big outside lettuce leaves, the pepper centers, the cucumber peels, and the tomato stems. I didn’t push it and include the avocado skin, because who wants that?

I put his salad into his bowl, which he knows darn well is his now, and stood back to see what he did with it. First off, Angus raced in and snagged a lettuce leaf. Bad dog! Dogs don’t like lettuce (he did figure that out)!

Elvis sniffed suspiciously, like perhaps I was poisoning his little goat system with this strange and exotic new thing. Then he delicately nibbled a lettuce leaf. Now, delicate is not normally in this goat’s vocabulary; usually he’s head butting the walls or jumping on the dogs. He may be compact, but that’s really just the energy of a regular-sized goat all crammed into a tiny little package, and it usually has to spring out from somewhere.

Picky little turd, when I left to go back to work, his bowl was still full. And he was eating out of the dog dish. He may not be sure if he’s a dog or a people, but he seems to be pretty sure that he’s not a goat, and therefore will not eat lovely vegetables.

I never heard of a picky goat before.