farmdoc's blog post number 400

My dentist’s name is Tiffany. Sweetheart Vivienne says Tiffany’s an appropriate name for an airline flight attendant, or a hairdresser or beautician – but definitely not a dentist. I don’t know if first names determine occupation. But I think they’re somewhat related to personality and behaviour. Who are the alpha males? Leslie, Hilton, Oliver. Or Chuck, Rex, Steve. And so to billy goat names. Because their main desirable quality is virility, billys tend to be named accordingly. On our farm our best example was Randall (‘Randy’ for short). This year, to prevent inbreeding, i.e. to deepen our gene pool, we needed a billy from a new bloodline. Our neighbours Julie and Wayne kindly offered to loan us one of their billys. Last Friday Sharon and I collected him, brought him to our farm, drenched him, checked him for lice, then released him to play with his 29 new girlfriends. He was ready, too: piddling on his beard, and reeking of a stench only nanny goats could find attractive. As the photograph shows, he’s a fine looking fellow. He’ll be with the girls for six weeks – two goat menstrual cycles – so we’ll take him home on 3 July. His name? Flynn. Named after that swashbuckling womaniser Errol Flynn – a Taswegian, and also the reason for the phrase ‘in like Flynn’. I doubt our Flynn’ll have any problem in that department.