Agricultural History Review, Volume 63 Part 2 (2015), p. 329

Joy Hinson’s Goat is one of a series of Animal books edited by Jonathan Burt and published by Reaktion Books, and thus sits within a menagerie of titles dealing with everything from ants to vultures, from bears to tortoises. The series aims to provide a short but comprehensive review of the animal subject of each book, covering species’ natural and social histories, their place in mythology and religion, their relationships with human animals, and so on. Goat is an interesting addition to the series, aiming to provide an overview of all things caprine from the starting point that goats have often been overlooked as domestic farmed animals – the ‘poor man’s cow’ – while in fact having important economic and (fascinatingly ambiguous) symbolic roles.

The Introduction establishes how goats do indeed play a quite startlingly diverse range of roles in their relationships within ecosystems, in their economic relationships with humans and perhaps most interestingly, in how they become culturally meaningful. Thus on the one hand they embody and symbolize human institutions (for example as sporting or military mascots) while on the other they carry a wide range of often quite divergent cultural associations; for example, goats can be emblems of efficiency in their use of poor-quality agricultural land but can also represent lust, the satanic, fertility and playfulness (capriciousness). The book’s six substantive chapters build on the Introduction’s tantalizing glimpses of the richness of goats’ many (real and figurative) places in the world and their entanglements with human life, giving more detailed discussions of the ‘wild’ goat’s natural history, its domestication, the goat as a feral creature, the place of the goat in myth and folklore, the use of goats in medicine and the place of the creature in the twenty-first century.

The chapters covering the ‘wild’ and ‘domestic’ goat involve a shift from a global mapping of the distribution of goat species, along with discussion of their biology, social behaviour and ecological relations, to a much more geographically specific history of domestication and the entanglement of goats with (human) society and politics, which focuses quite heavily on the UK (saying much less about the Global South, despite goats’ historical and continuing importance to rural economies in ‘developing’ countries). Feral goats get a chapter to themselves, telling a story of how such animals, establishing populations after escaping from domestication, are seen as damaging the ecosystems in which they take up residence and as such tend to be regarded (and thus targeted) as pest species.

The following chapters on goats and mythology and folklore, and goats and medicine, offer stimulating reading on the highly diverse material-semiotics of goat-human relations. As suggested, goats can stand for many things and represent diverse human characteristics. They, and their bodily products (their milk and dung, for example), have also had traditional medicinal uses. There is a sort of bodily potency associated with goats which ties together their symbolization of lust, the devil and playfulness, for example, with the supposed powers of their faeces, milk and bezoars (concretions found in the animals’ stomachs). Finally, a discussion of the twenty-first century goat emphasizes the continuing importance of this species to human societies, despite the way in which goats have tended to be dismissed as major contributors to industrialized agricultural and food systems. The charitable (and perhaps problematic) ‘donation’ of goats to communities in the Global South is just one example. At the same time, goats are still employed as military and sporting mascots, are raced at festivals and fairs, and continue to carry magical and symbolic weight in some parts of the world and in our language.

At the end of the book, readers are also provided with a goat timeline, taking them from the ancestral progenitors of ‘modern’ goats 8.2 million years ago, through a history of domestication and representation, culminating with a version of the goat as a ‘pest’ species in some ecosystems, which leads to the introduction of eradication strategies. For readers inspired to take up goat keeping, details of US and UK goat societies are also provided.

The book is very well illustrated throughout with images of goats in their ‘natural’ and domestic environments, and with numerous pictures of different cultural representations of goats. These really add to the enjoyment to be gained from this book, emphasizing the cultural significance of these animals, including (for example) their importance to representations of the erotic, and their role (as illustrated in the well-known mid-nineteenth-century painting by William Holman Hunt) as the ‘scapegoat’.

While such a short book can really only touch on what goats are and can mean, and as such can sometimes seem to become rather a list of interesting ‘facts’ and examples, this is the remit of the series and does not detract from what is an enjoyable text. Readers are reminded of how a particular animal’s place in the world is complex and heterogeneous, particularly when considered in its relations with humans, and stimulated to think further about the wider complexities of human-animal relationships, which are so significant to our everyday worlds.