Adrian Rogers: Tick on a dog easier find than legendary pet goat

The cats were yowlin’ and the grass was up, and like clockwork I had babies on the brain. Kids, actually. Juvenile goats.

It has long been my dream to own a goat, one of those short squat ones who look like footstools. She would be a girl, and she would amble around my yard cropping the grass short, offering goat nuzzles to passers-by, every other week or so presenting between her cloven hands a creamy chunk of goat cheese as a token of thanks.

At night the goat would come inside, where she would happily serve as an ottoman while, together, we watched Animal Planet. (In my fantasies I always have cable television.)

My problem was that the pasture I have to offer a goat is on the South Hill, the lower, more crowded part. I wasn’t sure goats were allowed. My other problem was that, while I’ve long admired their work with cheese, I knew very little about goats.

However, I knew I had precedent. Somebody on the lower South Hill once had a goat. I knew it was true because my brother said he saw it. I knew where I had to go: a couple of miles west.

For my search for the lower South Hill goat, my brother made a map of the neighborhood where he saw the goat, marking four corners where it especially might have been. It was around 11th Avenue or 12th Avenue or maybe 10th around Ash or Elm streets, something like that. It was definitely near his girlfriend’s old apartment. Some years ago. There might have been something about a fence.

Armed with these clues and this map, I packed up my dog and I hit the road in my small brown car. I took the dog because of his special ability to sense other animals that he might want to eat, and he did alert at several points by whining and rushing between back-seat windows.

But while we encountered several squirrels and a black poodle-like number, we found no goat. I didn’t even see a yard that bore the neatly trimmed yard and possible fence that would have marked a goat within.

Back at home, the task loomed impossible. There might have been a goat somewhere on the South Hill, but I felt like I was looking for a small reddish-brown tick on a medium-sized brownish-black dog.

After looking at the Internet for a while (Lonely? Try http://garbagegoat.com/gg/), I consulted Grace Stumpff, 73, who is not a lower South Hill resident but who is a great fan of goats.

She raised eight human kids and turned to dairy goats after her three youngest children developed allergies to cow milk. “They call me the goat lady in the Valley,” she said.

And after 40 years of raising goats (she has about a dozen goats, Nubians – which have long ears that hang down – and pygmys), Stumpff was able to confirm my suspicion that goats make excellent pets.

“Goats are the closest thing to people, actually,” she said. “They’re so personable. It’s hard to explain. They’re just enjoyable to be around. Of course, they don’t argue with you like people do.”

If I wanted a goat, she said, I would have to:

“Get not one goat but two. Goats need company in the form of other goats. It’s possible that my dog would make company for my goat, Stumpff said, but not likely.

“Find a reputable breeder with clean facilities and a good worming program.

“Create a shelter outside for my goats.

“Not let my goats inside. Goats can be housetrained, Stumpff said, but it takes more patience than even she has.

“Feed them goat food.

“Give them a room to jump and play and maybe toys like teeter-totters.

“Make sure none of my plants are poisonous to goats.

And probably most importantly:

“Make sure I’m zoned for goats.

Zoned for goats. Cold words.

Verbatim, the cold words contained within Spokane’s city code are: “The keeping of large domestic animals is permitted outright only in the RA zone.”

Heather Trautman, of the city’s Code Enforcement department, told me that Spokane’s “residential agriculture zone” is in Vinegar Flats, on the southwest edge of the city, which is not where I live.

And large domestic animals include horses, donkeys, burros, llamas, bovines, sheep and swine. And goats. Furthermore, according to city code: “Miniature large animals are considered large animals.”

Trautman suggested that if I wanted a goat so bad I move to Vinegar Flats or to an unincorporated area of the county where large domestic animals are allowed.

My goat prospects down, my attention returned to the dog. He needed a walk. My boyfriend and I were driving in unincorporated Spokane County on our way to Turnbull Wildlife Refuge, and lo and behold, I spotted some floppy-eared goats in a pen.

Now, if another person were driving from the South Hill to Turnbull, he probably wouldn’t see these goats, because they were off the beaten path. There is only one animal on this planet who makes it take an hour to get from the South Hill to Cheney, and he was driving. In the back seat, the dog was whining to the point of neighing. In fact, I’m not sure what goats say, but the dog might have been saying it.

So we didn’t stop to see those goats, and then on the way back, we were busy leaping around the Chevron station parking lot in our socks, screaming, “Get it off! Get it off!” and then making the dog play Ballroom Dancing With Mother to give Father better access to his (the dog’s) under-parts for purposes of picking off the ticks. So we didn’t stop at the goats on the way back, either.

What do goats say? I’ll probably never know.