Philosophy
Saturday, December 5, 2015
A folk tale depiction of Father Christmas riding on a goat.
A folk tale depiction of Father Christmas riding on a goat.
A folk tale depiction of Father Christmas riding on a goat.
The Yule goat is a Scandinavian and Northern European Yule and Christmas symbol and tradition. Its origin may be Germanic pagan, and has existed in many variants during Scandinavian history.
Modern representations of the Yule goat are typically made of straw.[1] The custom of wassailing is sometimes called "going Yule goat" in Scandinavia.
Link:
The Swedish Gävle Goat
The Gävle Goat of 2009
The Swedish Gävle goat in 2006.
The Gävle Goat (Gävlebocken) is a traditional Christmas display erected annually at Slottstorget ("Castle Square") in central Gävle. It is a giant version of a traditional Swedish Yule Goat figure made of straw, and is erected each year at the beginning of Advent over a period of two days[1][2] by local community groups.
It is notable for being a recurring target for vandalism by arson, and has been destroyed several times since the first goat was erected in 1966.
Link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%A4vle_goat
Thursday, October 22, 2015
Tuesday, October 6, 2015
Hear from Matthieu Ricard
Hear from Matthieu Ricard, known by many as the "happiest man on earth" about Altruism, his new masterwork presenting a global vision based on decades of personal experience and insight, a roadmap for the 21st century. Ricard demonstrates how altruism is not an abstract ideal, but an essential dimension of our nature that everyone can cultivate. He explains how it is the vital thread that can answer the main challenges of our time: economic inequality, life satisfaction, and environmental sustainability. The conversation will be moderated by Jeffrey Walker, United Nation Secretary General's Envoy for Health Finance and Malaria
POSTS
Monday, October 5, 2015
Wednesday, September 23, 2015
Coombs Market
The Old Country Market in Coombs is famous for our international foods, imported gifts, in store baked goods, and of course... ice cream. We also have a restaurant, a deli and fresh produce all under the roofs of our recently renovated market. If this isn't enough, when you have shown the family all there is to offer in the market...up the hill is our fabulous Cuckoo's Trattoria and Pizzeria in the Big Villa at the back, as well as our take-out style Mexican cantina "Taqueria".
http://www.oldcountrymarket.com/market.php
Hassle free "Goat Markets"
Hassle free "Goat Markets"
Emeka Okafor at Timbuktu Chronicles - 11 hours ago
A potential for similar platforms in Africa? *Al Jazeera* reports: Increasing number of traders and customers head online for "hassle free" transaction of livestock to slaughter for Eid...farmers said they were increasingly moving to India's popular online classified portals like Quikr and Olx, for easier and stress-free sales. "I am getting 10 to 15 calls every day," Qaiser Khan, from the northern state of Rajasthan, told AFP news agency. Khan said he usually travelled to markets throughout Rajasthan in the lead up to Eid, keeping him away from home for weeks. But this year he h... more »
The goat gamble
http://www.downtoearth.org.in/coverage/the-goat-gamble-2329
Giyasilal Saini is a marginal farmer who has market savvy. It comes from experience. Living in a semi-arid area like Alwar in Rajasthan, he always knew he could not depend on farming alone. So he would keep some goats, like others in village Jaitpura. Then three years ago the pond that irrigated his tiny field dried up. “Rains have not been enough. I spent a fortune on irrigating my field but could not grow enough for my family,” said the 36-year-old. He devoted his energy to goat rearing.
Within three years Saini’s herd grew from 20 to 80-strong, the largest in his village. “They serve as a 24-hour cash bank,” he said, closely inspecting the mouths of goats. He displayed two large teeth in the lower front jaw of one of the goats. “It means the chhendi (goat) is over 12 months old and the thickness of its backbone suggests it has gained 10 kg of weight,” said Saini. “I can now sell it for at least Rs 1,500.”
Saini sells 35 goats in a year to the Khatiks, a community that trades in goats, for Rs 1,500-1,800 per head. While earlier he could hardly make ends meet, today he has one of the most well maintained houses in the village.
Goat rearing is not capital intensive, hence easy to start. The partially denuded Aravali hills provide free grazing ground; that saves close to 70 per cent of the rearing cost. Being prolific eaters with super efficient digestive system, goats can eat anything anytime.
Like Saini thousands of small and marginal farmers in rainfed Rajasthan have switched to goat rearing. In the process they have earned the state a superlative: host to the largest number of goats in the country. As per the National LivestockCensus 2007, Rajasthan has 21.5 million goats, which is about 14 per cent of India’s total goat population. In the past 10 years, goats in Rajasthan have increased by 27 per cent as against the all-India rate of 15 per cent. But why does a state with least mutton consumption in the country make this choice?
The reason is ecological. With the expansion of desert in Rajasthan, the population of goats will rise. People shift from agriculture and cattle rearing to goat rearing because goats can survive in harsh environment and still provide good profit. “This is the reason Rajasthan has the highest goat population in the country even though its non- Muslim population is mostly vegetarian,” said K A Singh, director of the Indian Grassland and Fodder Research Institute in Jhansi, Uttar Pradesh.
Sixty per cent of the state is arid or semi-arid. It has suffered 40 droughts in the past 50 years. Less than a third of the total 21.6 million hectares (ha) of cropped area has assured irrigation. Land degradation and uncertain monsoon have encouraged farmers in most parts to diversify into goat farming, vouch farmers of Alwar. The more arid a place, the more its dependence on goat rearing. Livestock contributes up to 60 per cent to the household income of marginal farmers in western Rajasthan.
Goat’s biology makes the trade competitive compared to one-crop rainfed farming. From the age of one, they are able to conceive and breed twice a year. Most of the time they give birth to twins, sometimes to triplets or qua druplets. “It is like a crop. By the time you sell one bunch, another gets ready,” said Saini.
Lucrative crop
India follows Rajasthan’s trajectory in goat rearing. It has the world’s largest goat population after China. As per the National Livestock Census the goat population in the country has almost doubled in 30 years: from 76 million in 1977 to 140.5 million in 2007. The rate of increase in goats in the past five decades has been the highest among all ruminants; they beat sheep and cattle (see graph ‘Goat numbers grow fastest’ on right). This growth rate is in spite of an annual slaughter rate of 38 per cent.
Market demands
What is also pushing goat numbers is the rising demand for goat meat in India, both for domestic and international market. Consumption demand is more pronounced in urban areas that are growing at the rate of 2.5 per cent per year. While rural population has grown at 1.7 per cent a year between 1981 and 2001, urban population has grown at 3 per cent.
India is the largest goat meat producer after China. The rate of goat meat production (18.6 per cent) in 1997-2007 was double the production rate (9.3 per cent) in the previous decade. Despite a steady increase in supply, goat meat prices are continuously rising. The Wholesale Price Index shows the prices of mutton and goat meat have increased by 75 per cent in the past five years. This is the highest among all the primary food items except pulses and potato. In Delhi, goat meat prices increased from Rs 170 per kg to Rs 260 per kg in the past one year.
“The main reason for the price increase is the rising export of goat meat to West Asia,” said Mohammad Aqil Qureshi, former president of the New Delhi Meat Traders Association. Sixty countries import goat meat from India. Big importers are Saudi Arabia, UAE, Kuwait, Angola and Egypt. Nearly 80 per cent of the goat meat and mutton export is to West Asia. Although India’s current export of goat and sheep meat is 6.4 per cent of the production, export is where demand is set to explode. Export of goat and sheep meat has, in fact, increased more than eight times in the past two years, while production has increased marginally (see graphs). “People in West Asia are shifting from Australian sheep to Indian goats because the meat of our goats is tastier and low on fat,” said Qureshi.
This has turned goat into a much sought after economic instrument. “Both exporters and local traders buy from the same market. Since exporters have a better purchasing power they have captured 60 per cent of the goat market in Delhi,” said Qureshi. Exporters are buying goats at an even higher price going up to Rs 300 a kg, said Billal Qureshi who owns a meat shop in Delhi. The average sale age of goats is coming down. “We realised demand for the tender meat is rising,” said Rahul Chaturvedi of the Foundation for Ecological Security, an NGO studying the goat market chain in Rajasthan and Karnataka.
Insurance for the poor
Goat rearing was never so lucrative. Since goats were domesticated 10,000 years ago, they have been poor people’s most reliable livelihood insurance. The National Institute of Rural Development, Hyderabad, studied the economics of one buffalo v five goats in Rajasthan in 1999. It showed yearly profit from the goats was higher than from a buffalo.
This explains goats’ geographical and class biases. They are found more in ecologically fragile arid and semi-arid areas and goat rearers are mostly the poorest. It is not known whether goats were domesticated for riding out tough life in such areas or goats were responsible for ecological damage. But what is known is that in India goats are the most reliable source of earning a living in ecologically degraded areas. Of the 100 districts with high goat population in India, 24 are agriculturally distressed, 42 are chronically drought-prone and 21 show deforestation in 2007 as compared to 2005. Goat population is also high in disaster-prone areas, like parts of Bihar frequently ravaged by floods. In many ways, goat has everything a poor or a person in emergency needs: low investment, high and consistent returns and near liquid monetary status.
Add to this the spurt in demand for goat meat, and it is nothing short of an economic bonanza for India’s poorest. But the goat’s geographical bias also dictates its growth limit. The biggest incentive for goat rearing—free grazing— may not be there as the number increases. Saini of Alwar grazes his goats on a hill in Sariska National Park. Goats of 40 other villages graze on it. Once the hill is stripped of its vegetation, Saini will have to think of some other ways of providing for his family.
Costly silence
Goats give good returns only as long as fodder is free. Unlike cattle that are fed crop and crop residue, goats and sheep graze in wasteland, common grazing land and forests. In western Rajasthan, where degrading farm land and feed shortage forced people to abandon farming and cattle and turn to goats, pressure on grazing areas is showing.
Kankwari village in the core area of Sariska National Park is being shifted outside the park. Its remaining 55 families, with two-three goats each, graze goats on a hill inside the park, though grazing is not allowed in the core area. “We can survive only if our goats are allowed to graze on the dungar (hill),” said Kajod Singh, 70. Summers are especially tough. Mahavir Kumar of Baletha village in Alwar, who owns 50 sheep and eight goats, had to spend Rs 500 a tree a day to feed his livestock in summers. “Even vilayati babul (Prosopis juliflora) was rented out at Rs 500,” he said. Not all can spend on feeding goats. “I’d rather sell the goats in summer than spend Rs 8,000-10,000 (on 25 goats) to feed them,” said Sohan, a farmer in Gopalpura village in Alwar. This is what will happen to the goat economy if grazing land is not ensured.
With just 7.87 per cent of its area as forest and 4.98 per cent as permanent pastures and other grazing land, Rajasthan is especially vulnerable.
Change in cropping pattern is also shrinking grazing space. In the dry season a large number of herds of goats and sheep migrate from western Rajasthan to northern and eastern parts of the state, Madhya Pradesh and Uttar Pradesh. Earlier, farmers in villages on the way would ask herders to spend nights in their farms so that droppings of sheep and goats provide manure, said S K Shrivastava, chief conservator of forests, Rajasthan. Now people grow two-three crops a year, so most of the times the fields are cropped and farmers do not allow herders. “Herders often request us to let them stay in the forest,” he said.
Demand on forests will only rise with Rajasthan setting aside large chunks of community wastelands for biodiesel plantation. The Rajasthan Land Revenue 2007 Rules allow 1,000- 5,000 hectares (ha) of village common land to be transferred for 20 years from communities to the biofuel industry. Jatropha plantation in Ram pura, Unti and Manpura villages of Jaipur district have affected fodder availability, found a survey done in 2007-08 by non-profit Centre for Community Economic Development Consultants Society that works in Rajasthan.
They turn to forests
Threats to goat rearing are similar across India. Between 1960-61 and 2003- 04, land allotted for permanent pastures and forest grazing land decreased by a fourth, from 13.97 million ha to 10.44 million ha. In the same period the goat population more than doubled. In the next 10 years it will almost double again. “Since the grazing land is diminishing, the pressure is definitely going to be on the forest,” said Sunandan Tiwari who worked with non-profit Winrock International India that has recently prepared a proposal for the Centre to develop a national grazing policy.
Winrock International estimates 272 million livestock graze in forest land and 78 per cent forest area in India is subject to grazing. According to BAIF Development Research Foundation, a public charitable trust, forest areas are overgrazed, with 100 million cow units (grazing equivalent of an adult cow) grazing in forests against a capacity of 31 million in 2004-05.
Forest officials already see goats as a threat. “There is a saying in Rajasthan that Oont chhode aankda, bakri chhode kankda (the camel eats every plant except aankda, a thorny shrub common in the desert, but the goat eats every- thing except stones),” said S K Shrivastava, chief conservator of forests, Rajasthan. “Whatever little regeneration of the forest happens in the monsoon, it is eaten up by the goats and sheep.”
A community of herders, Raikas have been protesting against the forest department across the state for grazing rights inside forests. Residents of Mandalvas village in Sariska’s buffer zone complain forest officials often lock the goat and the herder and fine Rs 50 per goat. “Troubled by this, villagers have sold goats,” said sarpanch Phool Singh Meena. “Till five years ago our village had thousands of goats; now it has 200- 300. Grazing is the biggest problem.”
Foresters think the damage done by goats to the forest is the maximum among all the livestock due to their grazing habits. “An area where goats graze is not likely to regenerate because they eat the rootstock of the grass. Being small, they can reach places other cattle cannot,” said P B Gangopadhyay, additional director general of forests. Behavioural studies conducted at the Central Institute of Research on Goats, however, show goats defoliate smallest branches of trees without damaging the twigs, said the institute’s director Devendra Swaroop.
Goat v environment
This brings one back to a 25-year-old debate: are goats good or bad for the environment? (See ‘The goat debate’) In 1986 the rural development department had stopped distribution of sheep and goats under the Integrated Rural Development Programme in ecologically fragile areas. It feared goats might encourage deforestation. Civil society came out in support of goats. In December that year a task force was set up to study the impact of sheep and goat on ecology. “A comparative study of sheep and goat rearing and of cattle in ecologically fragile zones indicates that, within the desired grazing pressure, sheep and goats are more economical and less harmful than large ruminants,” concluded the task force in 1987.
All these years, no one defined “desired grazing pressure”. It is the first step to sustained grazing.
Act before vicious cycle sets in
Goat rearing is the poor’s survival response to an ecological crisis. It has turned out to be an economic success. But the goat economy has the potential to precipitate an ecological crisis if grazing is not ensured. Options before India are very few: shrinking grazing ground, restricted forest land and stall feeding. India has to respond quickly to protect both poor people’s livelihood and ecology. How can it achieve that?
To begin with, the ministries concerned have to turn attention to grazing. At present, no ministry is concerned with grazing. The animal husbandry department’s mandate is to popularise goats, the agriculture ministry is limited to crops, the rural development ministry merely factors in goat rearing in its programmes and the environment and forests ministry just opposes grazing inside forests. If natural resources are to be protected, departments of animal husbandry, agriculture and rural development and the environment ministry will have to work together, Sunandan Tiwari, who has worked with non-profit Winrock International, said. “You cannot stop people from rearing goats; it is a lucrative business. But a clear understanding of the carrying capacity of the land is necessary,” he added.
Goats being a private resource that survive on common resources, grazing and forest land, India needs to have a clear policy on goat grazing. Discussion on grazing policy at the national level has been going on since 1994. Madhya Pradesh and Andhra Pradesh have attempted adopting a policy; it did not work. In Madhya Pradesh, the government formed grazing rules after studying the carrying capacities of the grasslands in mid-1980s. The rules were withdrawn because people as well as politicians opposed them.
Can stall feeding help?
Now there are talks about stall feeding. Hanumantha Rao, chairperson of the task force that was set up in 1986 to evaluate the impact of goat and sheep rearing in ecologically fragile zones, suggested a middle path. “The importance of goats in the livelihood of poor cannot be ignored. But since demand for goat meat is touching the sky a major part of it should be met through commercial goat farming so that there is least pressure on natural resources,” he said.
M M Roy, director of the Central Arid Zone Research Institute in Jodhpur, thinks it is already happening. “People are shifting from extensive (open grazing) goat rearing to semi-intensive and intensive (stall feeding) rearing,” said Roy. “In the metros many companies are entering goat farming because it is profitable.”
Feeding in such farms is done through industrial production of fodder. Given the shortage of fodder in the country, stall feeding may not be tenable. Currently, 253.26 million tonnes of dry fodder is available in India against the demand of 415.8 million tonnes.
The fodder and livestock sectors come under the agriculture ministry. “The ministry thinks its only priority is to feed the people. What about the feed for animals?” asked an official in the Union environment and forests ministry.
Goat is a symbol of the fragile equation between ecology and economy in India. Let’s sustain it.
With inputs from Ravleen Kaur and Ankur Paliwal
Source: http://www.downtoearth.org.in/coverage/the-goat-gamble-2329
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Tuesday, August 18, 2015
Sunday, July 26, 2015
Goat tags along
Photograph by Evans O.
Kenya: .This woman had wrapped the goat kid on her chest like her own kid while pulling the mother with a rope to take mother and kid to safety. The goat had given birth in the field.
Smiling Goat
Welcomed in Belalp by a beautiful smile on a gorgeous background. This young goat does know how to charm hikers.
Tuesday, July 7, 2015
Monday, July 6, 2015
Traveler and his goat make stop in Nashville
Erick “Rockclub” Brown’s goat, Deer, is his traveling companion (Photo: Jamie McGee
Erick "Rockclub" Brown, wore tie-dye, visiting Nashville with his pet goat, Deer, while exploring downtown during the past week as part of a planned nationwide road trip that began in Destin, Fla., in April.
Traveling in a gray van and a trailer for Deer, Brown's mission is to see as many states as possible and to inspire others to live their dreams.
Funny Goats Screaming like Humans
Published on Feb 23, 2013
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A funny compilation of Goats screaming like humans 2013.
tags: goats screaming,yelling goats,screaming goats, goats making human noises,goats like human,goats screaming like humans,funny animal,sounds like human,goat,goat compilation,stupid goats,compilation 2013,wierd sounds
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A funny compilation of Goats screaming like humans 2013.
tags: goats screaming,yelling goats,screaming goats, goats making human noises,goats like human,goats screaming like humans,funny animal,sounds like human,goat,goat compilation,stupid goats,compilation 2013,wierd sounds
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Tuesday, May 12, 2015
Goat Simulator Wiki
Goat Simulator
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
| Goat Simulator | |
|---|---|
 Steam header for Goat Simulator | |
| Developer(s) | Coffee Stain Studios Double Eleven(Xbox 360, Xbox One) |
| Engine | Unreal Engine 3 |
| Platform(s) | Microsoft Windows,OS X, Linux, iOS,Android, Xbox 360,Xbox One |
| Release date(s) | Microsoft Windows
|
| Genre(s) | Action |
| Mode(s) | Single-player,multiplayer |
Goat Simulator is a third-person perspective action video game developed by Coffee Stain Studios. It was released for Microsoft Windows via Steam on 1 April 2014, and ports for Mac OS X and Linux were released on 27 June 2014. Versions for iOS andAndroid were released on 17 September 2014. A version for Xbox 360 and Xbox Oneco-developed by Double Eleven was released on 17 April 2015.
The game has been compared by the developer as akin to skateboarding games, but where the player controls a goat aimed at doing as much damage as possible around an open-world map, without any other larger goals. The game, initially developed as a joke prototype from an internal game jam and shown in an early alpha state inYouTube videos, was met with excitement and attention, prompting the studio to build out the game into a releasable state while still retaining various non-breaking bugs and glitches to maintain the game's entertainment value.
The game received mixed reviews; some reviewers praised the title for providing a humorous sandbox interface to experiment with, while others criticized the game's reliance on social media to popularize what was otherwise a simple and buggy product.
Contents
[hide]Link: http://www.goat-simulator.com/
Saturday, May 2, 2015
Thursday, April 23, 2015
Wednesday, April 22, 2015
Goats fighting America's plant invasions
12 January
2015 Last updated at 19:00
ET
Each country has its own invasive
species and rampant plants with a tendency to take over. In most, the techniques
for dealing with them are similar - a mixture of powerful chemicals and diggers.
But in the US a new weapon has joined the toolbox in recent years - the
goat.
In a field just outside Washington, Andy, a tall goat with long, floppy ears,
nuzzles up to his owner, Brian Knox.Standing with Andy are another 70 or so goats, some basking in the low winter sun, and others huddled together around bales of hay.
This is holiday time - a chance for the goats to rest and give birth before they start work again in the spring.
Originally bought to be butchered - goat meat is increasingly popular in the US - these animals had a lucky escape when Knox and his business partner discovered they had hidden skills.
"We got to know the goats well and thought, we can't sell them for meat," he says. "So we started using them around this property on some invasive species. It worked really well, and things grew organically from there."
They are now known as the Eco Goats - a herd much in demand for their ability to clear land of invasive species and other nuisance plants up and down America's East Coast.
Over the past seven years, they have become a huge success story, consuming tons of invasive species.
"This is old technology. I'd love to say I invented it, but it's been around since time began” Brian Knox Eco Goats
"I joke that I drive the bus, but they're the real rock
stars," says Knox, who also works as a sustainability consultant.
Typically, chemicals and/or machinery are used to clear away fast-growing
invasive plants, but both methods have their drawbacks. Chemicals can
contaminate soil and are not effective in stopping new seeds from sprouting.
Pulling plants out by machine can disturb the soil and cause erosion.Goats, says Knox, are a simple, biological solution to the problem.
"This is old technology. I'd love to say I invented it, but it's been around since time began," he says. "We just kind of rediscovered it."
One of the reasons goats are so effective is that plant seeds rarely survive the grinding motion of their mouths and their multi-chambered stomachs - this is not always the case with other techniques which leave seeds in the soil to spring back.
Unlike machinery, they can access steep and wooded areas.
And tall goats, like Andy, can reach plants more than eight feet high.
A herd of 35 goats can go through half an acre of dense vegetation in about four days, which, says Knox, is the same amount of time it gets them to become bored of eating the same thing.
"They like the magic of getting on the trailer when all the food has gone and then they ride around for a bit and the next thing, the door opens and there's a whole new smorgasbord to eat."
Even more plant species could be added to the goat's diet, judging from some new research.
At Duke University in North Carolina, marine biologist Brian Silliman has spent 20 years working on understanding and eradicating the invasive species phragmites.
This reed, which thrives in salt marshes, can grow up to 10 feet tall, pushing out native species and blocking bay and sea views for coastal residents.
One way of tackling phragmites
is to burn it Silliman says at first he tried insects and other forms of "bio control" to
tackle the plant, but nothing worked.
"Then I took a holiday to the Netherlands, where the plant comes from, and saw it wasn't a problem there because it was constantly being grazed by animals," he says.
In studies, Silliman found that goats were very effective - in one trial, 90% of the test area was left phragmites-free.
"I think all wetland managers should take up this method," he says. "It's cheaper, less polluting, better for the environment and goat farmers get paid."
One plant goats are increasingly being used to clear is kudzu. This fast-growing vine, native to east Asia, was first introduced into the US in 1876, as a ornamental plant that could shade porches and prevent soil erosion.
But it is now often described as "the vine that ate the south" because of its ability to grow up to a foot a day in the warm environment of south-eastern states like Mississippi, Alabama and Georgia.
Over the last 10 years, however, many landowners have
successfully removed it using goats who repeatedly graze the plant until it
loses the will to grow back.
Brian Cash runs one of three animal grazing businesses in Georgia where kudzu
is a huge problem, not just because of the ground it covers but of the "kudzu
bug" - a small beetle which thrives on the plant and which causes a burning
sensation when squashed by bare skin.He learned about keeping a grazing herd on the US West Coast, where there are several dozen well-established goat grazing companies, but decided to adapt the formula.
"In the end we used herds of mostly sheep with some goats mixed in as we found the goats were harder to control," he says of his company Ewe-niversally Green. "We found that the goats led all the mutinies."
Brian Knox, in Maryland, agrees that some goats can be troublesome and he even admits to donating his grumpiest animal to a local butchery class.
But overall, he says he has a happy relationship with the animals.
"They certainly earn their keep," he says.
One of the more high profile jobs they have worked on was cleaning up the Congressional cemetery in Washington two years ago.
Large crowds came to watch as the animals spent a week chomping the overgrowth of Honeysuckle, Ivy and Poison Ivy. The goats even featured in newspaper and news programmes around the country.
This is one of the things he likes about taking goats into urban areas - the response of the city-dwellers, who are "fascinated", he says, to see how efficiently the goats gobble up the vegetation.
"It's still quite novel," says Knox.
Goats aren't a silver bullet. Knox often combines the goat clearance with some manual root cutting and even with a chemical treatment if needed.
But his goats have started to make an impact on the weeds choking America and, he says, they are having a lot of fun doing it.
Source: http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-30583512
Great Pyrenees, working dog babysits infant goats - Kids
AnimalWelfareApprv'd @AWAapproved · Apr 16Working dog lends a hand during kidding season at AWA's Windshadow Farm & Dairy in Bangor, MI http://www.mlive.com/news/kalamazoo/index.ssf/2015/04/guard_dog_cares_for_newborn_ki.html …
BANGOR, MI -- It's "freshening" season at Windshadow Farm and Dairy in Bangor, when dairy goats give birth to their kids and begin producing milk again.
With 120 does, the occasional problem arises, said farmer Ron Klein, and when that happened last week, flock guardian Libby, a Great Pyrenees dog, stepped up and out of her usual job description of protecting the flock from predators.
Goats who have never before had a kid can become totally bewildered and confused by birthing, Klein said, wandering off in a daze, then frantically searching barn and lots for the kids they left behind.
When that happens, he said, it is not unusual to find an older doe has taken charge of the abandoned kid.
Klein said that few days ago, he discovered a distressed La Mancha doe exhibiting obvious signs she had had a kid.
"But no kid was in sight -- not in the barn, huts, lean-to or with any member of the herd," Klein recently posted in EatLocal SW Michigan, an internet group endorsing locally produced foods. "It was a bad sign," Klein said. " I checked the cracks, crannies, base of the feeders--nothing."
Then behind one of the waterers, he found the newborn kid, safe, warm and dry with Libby.
"These guardian dogs are really amazing," Klein said.
Farmers, share your working dog stories and photos in the comments below.
Link: http://www.mlive.com/news/kalamazoo/index.ssf/2015/04/guard_dog_cares_for_newborn_ki.html
Friday, January 23, 2015
Sunday, January 18, 2015
Goat spider Hybrid
Synthetic biology and the rise of the 'spider-goats'
Horizon presenter Adam Rutherford looks at the advances in synthetic biology and genetic engineering that have resulted in, among other things, computer-made life forms and cancer assassin cells
Freckles looks like a perfectly normal kid. She has bright eyes, a healthy white pelt and gambols happily with Pudding, Sweetie and her five other siblings, exactly as you might imagine young goats do. Until I fend her off, she's very keen on chewing my trousers. To the casual observer, and to goatherds, she shows no signs that she is not a perfectly normal farmyard goat.
But Freckles is a long way from normal. She is an extraordinary creation, an animal that could not have existed at any point in history before the 21st century. She is all goat, but she has something extra in every one of her cells: Freckles is also part spider.
That is what we can now do with genetics: extreme crossbreeding. If 20th-century biology was about taking living things apart to find out how they work, the current era is defined by putting them back together, but not necessarily as evolution decreed, and certainly without the clumsy constraints of mating. Freckles is the result of genetic engineering. But our mastery of manipulating DNA has evolved into an even more extreme form of tinkering, broadly called "synthetic biology". I've been tracking this emerging field since finishing my PhD in genetics 10 years ago, but intensely in the last year as a presenter for the BBC's flagship science strand, Horizon.
Freckles is the creation of Randy Lewis, a professor of genetics at Utah State University. The farm is a university outpost where they research modern farming techniques, teach animal husbandry and raise what are inevitably referred to as "spider-goats".Randy, like many of the other scientists here in Logan, Utah, has farming in his blood. So although a creature that is part goat, part spider might seem like an idea born of science fiction, as far as Randy is concerned it's simply advanced farming: breeding animals to produce things that we want.
"We're interested in dragline silk – the silk that spiders catch themselves with when they fall," he tells me in his midwest lilt. "It's stronger than Kevlar. It really has some amazing properties for any kind of a fibre."
In a sense, spider-goats are an extension of the farming we've been doing for 10,000 years. All livestock and arable has been carefully bred, each cross being a genetic experiment of its own. "The trouble is, you can't farm spiders," Randy says with an almost comic deadpan face. "They're very cannibalistic." He and his team took the gene that encodes dragline silk from an orb-weaver spider and placed it among the DNA that prompts milk production in the udders. This genetic circuit was then inserted in an egg and implanted into a mother goat. Now, when Freckles lactates, her milk is full of spider-silk protein.
We milk Freckles together and process it in the lab to leave only the silk proteins. With a glass rod, we delicately lift out a single fibre of what is very obviously spider silk and spool it on to a reel. It has amazing, and desirable, properties, which is why Randy's seemingly bizarre research is so robustly funded. "In the medical field, we already know that we can produce spider silk that's good enough to be used in ligament repair," he tells me. "We already know we can make it strong enough as an elastic. We've done some studies that show that you can put it in the body and you don't get inflammation and get ill. We hope within a couple of years that we're going to be testing to see exactly the best designs and the best materials we can make from it."
The instructions for all creatures that have ever lived (as far as we know) are written in the code of DNA tucked away in the heart of living cells. Given the bewildering diversity of life on Earth, this system is incredibly conservative. All life is based on an alphabet of just four letters, which, when arranged in the right order, spell out proteins. And all life is made of, or by, proteins. So what this means is that the code for making silk in a spider is written in exactly the same language as the code for making goats' milk.
Since the advent of genetic engineering, we have been able to exploit the universality of this code and cut and paste bits of DNA from any one species into any other. Identifying the genetic basis of all cancers and inherited diseases came from this technology: human or mouse genes have been spliced into bacteria so we could study and experiment on those damaged bits of code. Now, this editing technology has progressed to the extent that all bits of DNA code are effectively interchangeable between all species. In fact, Freckles and the other spider-goats are not even on the cutting edge. The loosely defined field of synthetic biology has come to incorporate even more extreme forms of genetic tinkering.
The most striking headlines so far came when American biologist Craig Venter announced in 2010 that he had created the world's first synthetic life form. Synthia, aka Mycoplasma mycoides JCVI-syn 1.0, was a cell whose genetic code, copied and modified from an existing bacterium, had been assembled not by its parent, but by a computer. That code, including literary quotations and website addresses, was then jammed into the eviscerated chassis of another similar cell and the whole thing booted up. It did live and it hadn't lived before.
But to say that he had "created life" is a stretch that Venter – a master of PR as well as an accomplished scientist – allowed to foment and the press lapped up. It's more accurate to say that he rebooted life, his aim being to create a living template on to which new genetic functions could be built. Nevertheless, it remains an astonishing technical achievement, showing our dominance over DNA; not only can we modify one or two genes, we can make enough to power up a living thing.
The scientists who work in synthetic biology often take a perfunctory, reductionist view of what they do. Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor Ron Weiss is a founding father of this field, a purist who started fiddling with the code of life while coding computers. "I decided to take what we understand in computing and apply that to programming biology. To me, that's really the essence of synthetic biology."
This may sound glib. Life forms are complex at every level. If there is one concrete thing we have learned from the billions spent on reading our own genetic code, it's that biology is messy. Scientists are often confounded by baffling "noise" in the molecules that make up living organisms, unpredictable variation set among unfathomable sophistication. Weiss and his comrades at the BioBricks Foundation want to strip out all the noise in biology and turn it into pure engineering, where organisms can be treated like machines and their inner workings are component parts.
Genes have evolved over millions of years to bestow survival on their hosts by having very specific functions. By standardising these genetic elements in an online registry, anyone can piece them together in any order to create biological circuits with entirely designed purpose. Even the language used is more the stuff of electrical engineering than traditional biology.
"Imagine a program, a piece of DNA that goes into a cell and says, 'If cancer, then make a protein that kills the cancer cell; if not, just go away.' That's a kind of program that we're able to write and implement and test in living cells right now." What Ron Weiss is describing is a study his team published last autumn showing that, by using the logic of computer circuits combined with BioBricks parts, they had built a cancer assassin cell. The logic of the genetic circuit initially distinguishes a cancer cell from a healthy cell using a set of five criteria. It then destroys the tumour cell if it satisfied those conditions. This sniper targeting is the opposite of the blunderbuss approach of chemotherapy, which can destroy both tumour and healthy cells with reckless abandon.
Over the last few years, BioBricks has grown into a global phenomenon. The Registry of Standard Biological Parts currently contains thousands of bits of DNA, all freely available, and this democratisation of science is built into the BioBricks ethos. Every year, undergraduate students compete in an international competition to think of a problem and design and build its solution, using only the parts available in the registry. 2011's European champions, from Imperial College London, designed a system for preventing soil erosion and the conversion of land into desert. There is a remix culture within these teams; it's serious play (the grand prize is a silver Lego brick) and they come from diverse backgrounds – maths, engineering, even astrophysics – unfettered by the narrowly defined science disciplines under which I did my DNA research.
The ease of access to this bleeding-edge technology is breathtaking. Last summer, in suburban Sunnyvale, California, I hung out at a gathering of synthetic biology weekend hobbyists, self-styled as "bio-hackers" with the excellent name BioCurious. There, high-school students were learning about biology by introducing fluorescent proteins from deep-sea jellyfish into bacteria to make them glow in the dark. In 2009, three scientists won Nobel prizes for this work. Already, it is literally child's play.
As with any great revolutions, there are those who stand to make a killing after the doors are kicked open. At the other end of the scale from the open-source, open-access utopia of BioBricks, synthetic biology commercial enterprises are emerging. The tech may be new, but the fields are not. With synthetic biology only a few years old, the most intense areas of commercialised synthetic biology are in fuel and drug production. California biotech companies such as LS9 and Amyris have ploughed millions of dollars into developing synthetic organisms that will produce diesel. In its futuristic labs in Emeryville, Amyris has modified brewer's yeast so that instead of fermenting sugar to produce alcohol, diesel seeps out of every cell. This synthetic biodiesel is already used to power trucks in Brazil. Amyris's ambition is to scale up from pilot plants to industrial-scale production. When I ask chief science officer Jack Newman if they envisage their biofuel replacing natural oil, he is suspiciously coy: "I'll be excited about a billion litres."
One significant fear has less to do with the science and more to do with the shifting balance of economic power. Technology watchdogs and campaign groups such as Friends of the Earth and ETC Group initially called unrealistically for a total ban on synthetic biology, even though it lacked a workable definition. ETC has modified its stance to focus on the industrialisation of these processes, and specifically the fact that synthetic biodiesel organisms need food.
Jim Thomas, who works for ETC, passionately feels that the control of fuel production is simply shifting from one set of corporate giants to another. "Large companies are buying up bits pieces of land so that they can grow sugarcane and then they're feeding it to vats of synthetic microbes to make fuels," he tells me. "Synthetic organisms at this point should not be out there in the environment; they shouldn't be out there in industry. That's irresponsible and inappropriate."
The culture of biology is rapidly changing and scientists and the public need to keep up. Synthetic biology has the potential to generate a new industrial revolution. It is perhaps the defining technology for the 21st century and it is happening now. Without an informed public discourse, fear of this unprecedented and sometimes unsettling technology may hinder the world-changing promise it harbours.
"Prediction is very difficult, especially about the future," as the great physicist Niels Bohr once said. But science fiction never got close to the outlook that came with the advent of synthetic biology. It is now easy to picture a world in which your torn ligaments are replaced with ones made from spider-silk produced by goats; where medicine is served by living programmable machines that seek and destroy only the cells that cause the disease; and where you will drive a car powered by diesel grown by brewer's yeast. Welcome to the future.
Adam Rutherford is a science writer and broadcaster
Source: http://www.theguardian.com/science/2012/jan/14/synthetic-biology-spider-goat-genetics
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