Feral Visitor.

[HansE]

Cropped picture of wild visitor this afternoon.

[eaglem]

Looks like a healthy beast.......must be eating well!

[seaslug]

I suspect they can be pretty destructive.

[HansE]

They are but they are also good at eating stuff like blackberries. They like variety and jump from one thing to another. I don't mind seeing a few on five hundred acres much to the consternation of my farmer neighbors.

[Isac]

Here's what I would do with the goat. Commonly known as 'Chevon" you can whip up a nice Goat Ragu with Red Wine. 1. Rinse the goat, pat dry, and season well. Heat one tablespoon of oil in a lidded ovenproof pan and brown the meat in batches, on both sides, then remove.
2. Add more oil and cook the onion, carrot, celery and garlic for 10 minutes until softened.
3. Add the red wine, tomatoes, tomato paste, sugar and stock, and bring to the boil, stirring.
4. Heat oven to 160C. Return the meat to the pan with bay leaves, thyme, oregano, chilli, sea salt and pepper, cover and cook in the oven for 1 ½ to 2 hours until tender. Skim off any excess surface fat, scatter with extra herbs and serve.

[HansE]

Ha ha. You have never eaten an old billygoat. I think you would have to marinate it in undiluted sulphuric acid for a couple of days before you did anything. But that could be nice with a young one. I have goat in an Indian restaurant occasionally which is very nice. Any time I have had it at home it hasn't been hung long enough. I have hunted deer and that worked a lot better.

[Ozzie_Traveller]

G'day Hans

I like this image - beaut and sharp and shows the animal + the environment very clearly
The other side of your title 'feral...' ~ anyone who travels between Cobar & Broken Hill in western NSW will come across hundreds & hundreds of these ferals grazing along the roadside

Phil

[HansE]

That's true. It has been a few years since I was that way. Noted that even though there were a lot of goats there were no dead ones run over by vehicles not like roos or sheep. This one was about 50mtrs from our house. I rarely shoot them so they are not so shy.

[HansE]

Not cropped Canon 60D sigma 18-250mm iso250 1/400 F10 250mm as you can see a little sharper.

[Toddyh]

Nice Hans.
There's certainly plenty out your way. I woke up with a nanny and a kid about 10m from my swag on sunday. I was near Sofala.
As Phil said though, the density of goats out the back of Bourke is amazing. I was out there in September and there is just thousands. The farmers don't touch them. They let them go and once a year round them up and sell anything valuable.

[HansE]

They tell me that they sometimes get better money from the goats than their cows.