The world’s pattern of goat keeping is very uneven. The animals play a major role in subsistence economies, where they provide useful products in return for a minimal investment of capital and labor. Thus, nonindustrial countries contain more than 90 percent of the half-billion goats in the world (FAO 1995). Goats adapt well to both dry and wet conditions and to tropical and midlatitude climates, and culture also helps to explain the importance the goat is accorded in the developing world. Islamic societies of the Middle East and North Africa have ennobled the goat as a source of food, and the Arab conquest of North Africa greatly expanded pastoralism as a way of life and the goat’s role in it. By contrast, the Romans in North Africa emphasized farming to a much greater extent. Yet the Islamic factor must also be weighed by the ability of the goat to thrive in a subhumid environment. Thus, for example, the rural folk of both Greece and Turkey have paid much attention to goat keeping. The summer drought of the Mediterranean climate has always made it difficult to supply the large amounts of better-quality fodder needed to sustain herds of cattle. Keeping goats as an alternative avoids this constraint.
Though only partly semiarid and Islamic, Nigeria has more goats - about 250 million - than any other country in Africa. No controlled breeding is practiced, and the typical herd comprised several different kinds, including dwarf goats, which stand less than 50 centimeters high (Epstein 1971). Goats constitute about half of the domestic grazing livestock in Nigeria and provide about one-quarter of the meat consumed in that country. Goat meat supplies protein, mostly to rural people, who also sell live animals in markets as a source of income. The animals generally fend for themselves, subsisting largely on browse discovered within a radius of their dwelling compound. Sometimes they are fed vegetable waste from the kitchen, and their owners typically provide water. Night shelter within the compound protects them from predators and thieves. During the planting season, goats are often tethered to prevent crop destruction. Most of the animals have parasites, and their mortality rate from disease is high.
Goats are also part of the rural tradition in Mexico. Most of the 9 million goats there browse the sparsely vegetated slopes throughout the country. Poor Mexican farmers have long counted on their cabras as sources of animal protein and income. The criollo breed, which evolved from goats brought from Spain in the sixteenth century, is well adapted to the hot, dry landscape. However, it is low-yielding in edible products and is a carrier of brucellosis, a disease of domestic animals often transmitted to humans. Goat keeping in Mexico today has the reputation of a backward livestock activity, and environmentalists blame free-ranging animals for much of the erosion of the hill lands.
World History
