We have four Catahoula dogs, all siblings.  We also have a German shepherd puppy they rescued out of the woods, four cats, chickens and a goat.  Life here gets interesting.  Everyone wants to be a herding dog, even the goat.  I've started this little comic strip to show some of the very dog oriented world we sometimes live in.  I'll be posting it every week, in between letting five dogs in and out of two doors and comforting confused mail carriers.

The UPS lady was very confused on Christmas Eve.  She came out of her truck with a box and walked swiftly and confidently up to me.  The lead Catahoula, Daphne, was at my side.  She has a supersonic trill bark that could make anyone deaf in a heartbeat.  So, it was obvious that while she handed me the package, the lady's eyes were entirely on the black and white sound machine at my side.  However, there as a quiet black and white creature to my other side, too.  She pulled two dog treats out of her pocket and started to hand them to me.  Then she said: 'Well, HELLO there' as she realized that the quiet creature was in fact, not a dog, but a goat.  The look on her face as she met my eyes was priceless.  I said : "Well, they'd both bark at you, if they could.  But actually, of the two, this is the one that will butt your truck, so the loud one is safer." 

We live in a pretty rural area, but she was still very surprised to see a goat standing in my front driveway!

A little backstory about Kitty Goat.  She was raised on a farm near us by an elderly couple who also raised Pyrennes dogs.  Kitty was the one goat kid that they couldn't keep away from the dogs.  She really thought she was a dog, the elderly lady told me.  So, when she was advertised on Craigslist as 'goat for sale, good with dogs, thinks it is a dog', we adopted her.  She has been excellent at eating poison ivy and keeping our driveway clear.  She has always gotten along so well with the dogs that we have to keep her on a slide lead, allowing her free movement, but only along a certain path.  Before we got the slide lead she would routinely follow the dogs to the road and being a leaf eater, get involved and sooner than later we would find her in the neighbor's garden and not very willing to come home.  That was more than six years ago.  She has grown up with our Catahoulas and sometimes we even say we have five and a half dogs, the half dog is a goat.

Marie Lamb lives in Tennessee, on a farm, with a large menagerie of animals.  You can follow Life with Catahoulas on Twitter at #lifewithcatahoulas or at https://knitowl.blogspot.com/search/label/lifewithcatahoulas publishing on Monday mornings.