Jan 16 2009
Goats in Space
One of my goats had a semi-blessed event yesterday, (semi-blessed as in one of her twins froze to death before I discovered them) and as busy as I’ve been in caring for the surviving goat kid, I’ve still managed to have some weird thoughts to share with you.
The baby goat Krystyna is about 1/2 Boer goat, her mama, Kallisto, being mostly Boer, and 1/2 Arapawa goat, her daddy, Knute, being a fullblood Arapawa. The Arapawa is a very rare goat which lives on an island in New Zealand, at least when the N. Z. government isn’t shooting them dead for being a nuisance.
There is a story about how the goats got to Arapawa Island. The great English explorer Captain James Cook stopped by New Zealand in the course of his voyages, and he is known to have left goats behind on an island which is believed to be Arapawa Island.
Sailing ships in those days sometimes carried goats as they could be a source of fresh milk, and also of meat if the female goats had some extra kids. Like other livestock that they carried, they could be given as gifts to Polynesian chieftains. And small breeding groups of goats were often left behind on small deserted islands. The idea was that the goats would breed, and on future voyages the explorers could come back and either hunt some of the goats for meat, or perhaps capture some female goats to replenish their milk-goat supply.
I don’t know if my Arapawa goats are really the offspring of the goats carried on Captain Cook’s ship. But the whole idea got me thinking about goats— goats in space.
Imagine a starship going to distant worlds on a mission of exploration. The crew of the ship will need to eat, won’t they? And if the crew wants milk, butter, and cheese, they might well consider bringing along a small group of goats. They can use aeroponics or hydroponics to grow grasses for the goats to eat.
As in the early voyages of Captain Cook, the space-faring explorers may give breeding pairs of goats to the people and/or creatures they meet on faraway worlds. They might also leave a few behind on planets with plant life that goats find edible, in the hopes that they will breed.
If the space travelers haven’t found some technological trick to get around the effects of time dilation in space, in which you spend a few months in space and find a few decades have passed on the world you left behind, this might have an interesting effect. You might leave two goats on a planet, leave for a few months, your time, come back to find a hundred years have passed and there are thousands of goats, and capture enough to sell for a profit on other worlds. (Note: the two goats have to be a male and a female for this to occur.)
Goats may well have been the first animal to be domesticated by man. It would be interesting to see how the goat-human relationship will play out as man moves on to the stars.
