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Enjoy this curated selection of theme-related dances for celebrations and holidays, or find a dance associated with a special calendar day, or EVEN your own birthday!
Aug 21
Goat Day
Frances' Goat Track
Other Scottish Country Dances for this Day
Today's Musings, History & Folklore
"A straight road never pleased a goat.”
Many Scottish Country dancers also appreciate a challenging track!
Happy International Goat Day! Why not channel your inner mountain goat and skip step along the dancing track of this 4-couple, 32-bar reel devised by Gaye Collin, which keeps dancers quite busy as they meander in and out between all the couples.
And what better dance for Goat Day! 🐐 A goat track is quite literally a narrow trail worn by sure-footed goats picking their way across steep and rugged country. The term naturally came to describe any path or road that is narrow, twisting, rough, or seemingly better suited to goats than humans.
Because goats have lived alongside humans for thousands of years, they have also wandered into a surprising number of our idioms—although being compared to one isn't always particularly complimentary!
Take “to get one’s goat,” meaning to annoy someone or cause them to lose their composure. The expression can be traced to at least 1905 and became especially popular during the 1920s. One wonderfully persistent explanation claims that goats were kept with nervous racehorses to calm them, and that stealing a horse’s companion before a race would literally get its goat and unsettle the horse. Unfortunately, word detectives have found little evidence that this is actually where the expression originated, though many horses do appreciate their goat friends.
Regardless, find your sure feet, try not to get anyone’s goat, and follow the winding track through Frances’ Goat Track! 🕺 💃 🤎 🤍 🤎 🐐 🐐 🐐
Frances' Goat Track
Goats may look perfectly at home scrambling over the rugged hills and mountains of New Zealand and Australia, but they are relative newcomers to both countries. In New Zealand, goats arrived with European explorers and settlers. Captain James Cook released goats in the Marlborough Sounds as early as 1773, and later sailors, whalers, sealers and settlers left them in remote places as a convenient future food supply. Goats were also taken along by gold miners, road and railway workers, and were later deliberately used to tackle blackberry, gorse and other troublesome vegetation. Inevitably, quite a few decided that life beyond the fence looked more interesting, and thriving feral populations followed.
Their remarkable climbing ability made them especially successful in New Zealand's rough country. Wild goats can negotiate steep crags, rocky slopes and narrow ledges that even deer may have difficulty reaching, and today they occur from sea level right up into alpine country. Unfortunately, what makes a goat such an admirable mountaineer also makes it a formidable environmental pest. They browse seedlings, shrubs and young trees, strip bark and trample vegetation, sometimes leaving a distinct goat track through steep country. New Zealand's Department of Conservation estimates that wild goats occupy about 14% of the country, and considerable effort now goes into controlling them to protect native forests and plants.
Across the Tasman, Australia has an even longer-running goat problem. Goats arrived with the First Fleet in 1788, valued because they were hardy, portable and capable of turning rather unpromising vegetation into milk and meat. Settlers, miners and railway construction gangs carried them into the interior, while sailors sometimes released them deliberately to provide emergency food. Escapees and abandoned animals soon established themselves in the wild, and feral goats are now found in every Australian state and territory.
Australia's dry, rocky landscapes proved almost ridiculously well suited to them. Feral goats can survive in country where many domestic animals struggle, but large herds compete with native wildlife and livestock, browse native plants and contribute to erosion and land degradation. So whether encountered on a New Zealand mountainside or an Australian rocky ridge, the goat is both an impressive survivor and a troublesome immigrant—a sure-footed little explorer that has spent more than two centuries demonstrating that, where goats are concerned, a fence is often less a boundary than a suggestion.
For more goaty information, click the goats!
Click the dance cribs or description below to link to a printable version of the dance!
