My Goats Have Discovered the Chickens’ Dinner

I bought two goats to help solve our household food waste problem. We were throwing away too much food, and I thought a male and a female would put suitable leftovers to use. Perhaps they would eventually produce kids, too.

It seemed a sensible arrangement. Then the male fell sick and died, leaving the female behind. Losing him was upsetting, and without a diagnosis, I cannot say what caused his death. The female stayed, grew, and became a regular recipient of our leftovers.

When there were no leftovers, I harvested plantain leaves for her. She ate; I watched. As a plant ecologist, I enjoyed seeing another destination for plant material beyond the familiar journey into a compost heap.

But she also discovered the chickens’ feed.

This was where my modest waste reduction project began developing expenses of its own. The chickens had their meals, and the goat apparently considered herself entitled to participate. Having leaves available did not diminish her interest in food purchased for somebody else.

Recently, I brought in a neighbour’s male goat, hoping he might breed with my now-grown female. I was thinking about possible offspring. The chickens immediately had a more pressing concern: there were now two goats interested in their dinner.

Watching them eat is amusing. It is also a remarkably useful lesson in competition.

Ecologists distinguish between competition within a species and competition between species. My two goats can compete with each other; together, they compete with the chickens. The shared resource might be leftovers or poultry feed. Either way, a mouthful taken by one animal is unavailable to another.

Their different feeding habits do not prevent this overlap. A goat’s digestive system allows it to use fibrous vegetation effectively, but that does not restrict its appetite to leaves. Given access to concentrated feed, it may readily eat that too.

Inside the rumen, microorganisms help ferment plant fibre. Chickens process food differently, using a muscular gizzard to grind it. These differences create opportunities for separate diets, even when the animals remain interested in the same feeding station.

Plantain leaves offer some separation. In ecological terms, differences in resource use can reduce competition. In practical terms, however, supplying leaves is only part of the solution. The poultry feed needs to be somewhere the goats cannot reach.

That discovery has made me reconsider what sustainability means in this backyard.

Using suitable food scraps can recover value from something we might discard. But when a goat eats purchased chicken feed, she is using resources already allocated to another animal. The birds lose part of their ration, and I may have to replace it. Nothing has been conserved simply because the feeding station is empty.

The better approach begins in the kitchen: prepare manageable portions, store food properly, and waste less. Animals can help use some unavoidable surplus, but their appetite should not encourage ours to become careless.

Their own diets matter, too. Leftovers cannot reliably supply everything they need. Goats require suitable forage, water, and minerals; excessive concentrated feed can disturb rumen function.

Manure provides another opportunity. Properly composted, it can return nutrients to soil and support plant growth. Yet every additional animal also needs food, water, space, and care. Any future kids will enlarge that responsibility.

I still enjoy the feeding-time commotion. I had bought goats to deal with leftovers; they have since taught me to look more carefully at everything we buy, grow, share, and discard.

The chickens, meanwhile, would probably settle for a feeding station with better security.