In Azerbaijan: Chapter 4
In which goats herd sheep, I narrowly escape conversion to Islam, and the cows come home.
Yes, the M2 highway was “forbidden” due to a landslide, but there was an alternate road to the mountains and the village of Qabala which led through the desert. Early on in my trip the AC in the Lada still worked well, so there was no problem staying in the hot valley. I took that desert road multiple times.
On my second trip to Qabala I stayed with Noura hanım and her daughter, Aytaq. Noura, like almost all the villagers in these parts, kept a handful of sheep and goats along with a few poultry birds. She wore a black hijab, spoke English, Russian, and Arabic (in addition to Azeri), and tried hard to convert me to Islam.
Sometime in her twenties Noura hanım had had a religious conversion experience, and she was hellbent on me having one too. She captured me during dinner on the porch, as the rain came down in sheets and prevented what would have otherwise been a hurried exit back to the safety of my room. When I interrupted her monologue (strewn with quotations from the Quran) to ask a clarifying question, I was sternly told to be quiet.
“Please, if you write, write this —” she said:
Noura had grown up in a village in the mountains near Sheki but ran away to Baku when she was sixteen years old. She worked there as a dancer and singer and reveled in the freedom of city life. Then, one day, during the month of Ramadan, a friend asked Noura for advice, and she realized she couldn’t give any.
“You tell people to do good, but you don’t do good yourself. Your good words can only touch people when you’re not a hypocrite.”
Noura’s conversion followed, and as far as I could tell the years had not diminished her zeal one bit. It was nearly impossible to ask her anything about agriculture or country life, but when we had first met outside her gate, she had been eager to talk about her animals.
“Oh, write about my goat!” she exclaimed. “Say Noura hanım has a good governor goat, all the sheeps listen to her.”
This little “governor” goat, it turned out, was the boss of the sheep herd. She would trot in front of them all, leading the way or telling them when to stop. She was smaller than most of the sheep, but held herself in a way that made clear she was in charge.
If Noura hanım hadn’t said anything I probably never would have noticed, but as I drove around the countryside, all over Azerbaijan, I saw that nearly every herd of sheep was led by a goat or two.
In America, if there is any association between goats and sheep, people who are familiar with stockyards might think of the so-called “Judas goat,” whose job it was to lead sheep to slaughter (keeping them calm and organized) in the growing slaughterhouse and meatpacking districts in the Midwest and elsewhere. Goats, it turns out, are better than dogs for this task, and they were used quite widely.
A common reward for the goat was a cigarette to munch on, which (predictably) resulted in nicotine addiction and great enthusiasm for the job. Apparently a few of these Judas goats are still in use in some slaughterhouses around the country and at livestock auctions in places like Texas, where they can move both sheep and cattle with ease.
How do goats do this? Where does their great leadership potential come from? Why do other animals follow them? I couldn’t find an answer, no matter how many articles I read, including one in which photographer George Lindblade was quoted as saying “I’ll bet Judas goats have been around since God invented dirt.”
Sounds true enough, but it doesn’t explain why God made them that way. Of course, all herd animals I know of have a hierarchical structure of sorts and a leader. Usually the leader is a matriarch, as in the case of American Bison, sheep, and goats (in the case of goats the leader is sometimes known as the “herd queen”).1
In Azerbaijan, I never saw goats leading sheep to slaughter, though of course most of the sheep were destined for people’s plates. Goats seemed to help manage the herd by leading them safely across mountain passes, keeping the sheep out of trouble, and bringing them home to the village every evening. Sheep dogs were often around (goats will not fight off a wolf) but they didn’t seem to lead the herd, only protect it.
One of the interesting results of man’s experiment with domestication that took off about ten thousand years ago is that various species of animal, some of whom wouldn’t spend much time together in nature, were brought into very close proximity to each other.2 As we’ve moved away from farms and purged animals out of our cities, we’ve lost not just the closeness that we used to have to animals, but also the ability to observe animals playing with each other, or cooperating in strange ways — like sheep and goats.
Once, while photographing milk goats in rural Pennsylvania for FireFly Farms creamery, I came across something remarkable. A small striped cat, who seemed to have a neurological condition, was sitting with in the pen with the goats. One of the goats was licking the cat, who was nuzzling against it.
This went on for some time while I watched and photographed. In that moment I felt an odd kinship with the goat — here, too, was an animal that liked to pet a cat.
Back in Azerbaijan, near the end of my trip, in another mountain village, the cows would come home every evening, making their way to their respective houses. One evening I watched the lady of the house where I was staying go out at dusk to watch the cows come in. Her cat followed, running through the wet grass at her heels to keep up. From the courtyard I watched the two of them, silhouetted against the fading light. They stood quietly, woman and cat, looking at the mountains, listening to the lowing of the cows coming home. I suppose they were each thinking of the milk they would enjoy later that evening.
My trip to Azerbaijan was generously funded by the Yale Global Food Fellowship.
Ryan A. Shaw, ‘Social Organization and Decision Making in North American Bison: Implications for Management’ (unpublished doctoral thesis: Utah State University, 2012), p. 3; Frank H. Mayer and Charles B. Roth, The Buffalo Harvest (Denver: Sage Books, 1958); Haenlein, G.F.W., Caccese, R., 1984. Behavior. In: Haenlein, G.F.W., Ace, D.L. (Eds.), Goat Handbook, Vol. F-10. USDA, Washington, D.C., pp. 1–6. I hope to devote some future writing to this topic and to some exploration of the scientific literature on the subject.
The late James C. Scott devotes many pages in Against the Grain to summarizing the health impacts of this multi-species convergence. Scott, James C. Against the grain: A deep history of the earliest states. Yale University Press, 2017. See Ch. 3: “Zoonoses: A Perfect Epidemiological Storm.” But, as I try to suggest, there have been some extremely positive effects of our agricultural experiment.