A word in your ear about the Goat Economy, Sir?

Are YOU doing YOUR bit for the Goat Economy?

How about YOU?

You’re probably exempt, though

Most Dutch TV is imported, and they don’t dub any of it into Dutch, they just subtitle it, so all Dutch TV users are immersed in various foreign languages spoken by native speakers everytime that they turn on the box. This, along with simply wanting to, is widely held to be the reason why it is quite hard to find anyone Dutch who isn’t more or less fluent in English, and a good many have German and French too.

But what about the Goat Economy?

I don’t know if “The Good Life” was ever shown here, but if it were it might explain the Dutch national obsession with Goats and, to a lesser extent, sheep, chickens and the occasional deer, rabbit or ostrich (although that could have been an emu, it’s so hard to tell…)

As a rule Dutch houses seem a little smaller than ours but they compensate by using open-plan arrangements to maximise the use of the space. The big difference seems to be that the houses all sit on bigger plots. You rarely see terraces of houses outside of town centres, and if you give a Dutchman a piece of land, he will buy a goat or three. Even in built up areas, just a few streets from the main street you will find houses with their front gardens fenced off and a range of livestock observing you as you pass. These gardens don’t need to be large, 5m x 3m seems to be enough to support a couple of goats or sheep and a few chickens. The goats seem entirely happy as long as they have some kind of structure to climb on, and generally look quite smug as they look down on you from the top of an old picnic table or some such. If he doesn’t keep livestock the other animal of choice is the horse / pony. There are 6 million people in Holland, and I suspect that there is a horse or pony for nearly everyone. Mostly this is out in the country, but we have seen horses and ponies kept in modest front gardens in town, sometimes with a goat or two for company. Whilst on the subject of horses, the Dutch seem to have mastered the art of breeding tiny horses, (as distinct from ponies, which are probably the most common horsey-type creatures here.) These tiny horses are small enough that you would have no trouble picking one up and running off with it, they really are no bigger than a large dog. I’ve been trying to get a good picture for a while but they’re quite furtive beasts...