Goats are playful animals. If you have never spent any time around goats, I urge you to change that! I love to interact with them and watch their antics! If you are ignoring them when they want to play, they will sometimes just bump right into you until you start paying attention to them. They also love to climb and jump. I once witnessed one of our goats trying desperately (but unsuccessfully) to climb a tree to get to the leaves she had her eye on, and I saw our youngest goat literally jump into the crotch of a tree to get a better vantage point yesterday!
Another great reason to set up a goat playground in your pasture is because goats who are bored come up with ways to escape. Let’s do our best to keep them entertained, shall we?
Like many goat owners, we have recognized a need for our goats to have some “specialty goat toys.”
Here is the goat playground for your entertainment.
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Eric works with tires, so it is easy for him to find some rejects to bring home for the goats! We just dug a trench and “planted” these in the ground.
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Eric brought this wire spool home from work. It is great fun for playing “king of the mountain!” As an added bonus, worms collect underneath, and it is a great place to grab some fishing bait!
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A baby slide like this one is always fun with goat kids!
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All but our oldest goat uses these toys in one way or another! I think they just never lost their instinct to climb that they had in the wild of the Alps. This is the closest I can come to a mountain for them, but I never hear them complain about it!
Does anyone else out there have any good goat toys?
For more goat stories, be sure to check out our “Animals” tab at the top of the page and my Fresh Milk 101 Pinterest Page!
If you love goats, you definitely need this crazy goat lady tea towel from our sister site, Delightful Towels!
***This post contains affiliate links. A small percentage of the purchase price of items bought here will go toward keeping this farm and this blog up and running, so thanks!***
Funny you should ask! A fellow chicken-keeper was sharing a story just this week of her mini Nubian goat babies hopping up on her fiancee’s BMW and doing a little jig when she forgot to close the garage door one day recently. 😮
LOL! He was not amused.
Thank you for linking up with the Clever Chicks this week; I hope you’ll join us again!
Cheers,
Kathy Shea Mormino
The Chicken Chick
http://www.The-Chicken-Chick.com
Thank you for the great ideas. I particularly like the tires because my neighbors left some in the alley. I’m going to grab them for the goats. I have two pregnant Nigerian minis, and am looking forward to having little ones around. It’s so much run to watch them play.
We built a mountain in the middle of our corral by stacking old cedar fence posts log house style using the long ones on the bottom and shorter ones progressively to make a pyramid about 6 feet high. Some where there is a picture of .Dokie and Dedo, mother and daughter spotted nubians, ruling that mountain taken by the local newspaper reporter.
Love the tire idea. We keep our goats entertained by dumping a big load of firewood at one end of the pasture. The wood is already bucked up and is just waiting to be split. By the time we get around to splitting it the goats have knocked off/ eaten off a lot of the bark and small branches. They climb it like a mountain and love it.
I bet the love climbing on the wood pile! Great idea! Thanks for sharing it!
We stuck old wooden fence posts in the ground and our bucks love to rub on them! We also use old logs, spindles, and a homemade teeter toter!
I bet the teeter totter is a hit! Maybe I need one of those…
We’ve used an arrangement of variety of different sized wooden spools… One tall, huge one, a medium sized, and a couple of taller narrower ones and included a shorter one so they could use it as a step onto the others. The taller narrower ones were spaced a little ways away, so they could jump from one to another. Our rural electric company will deliver them for free when they’re working in the area.
We re-used some dock sections as play platforms, or pallets would work – especially if you filled in the wider gaps.
They also enjoyed when we supported a long log on a few cement blocks, and used it as a bridge.
You might be just a bit redneck if you have an old camper shell in your goat lot. They LOVE climbing on it and hiding inside of it. Plus, it makes a secondary shelter for weather.
With you wooden spool its a good idea to cover the holes on top goats can break their leg in the holes
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tires are full of chemicals .should they be used as toys wont the chemicals affect the goats their milk and meat
I would only be concerned if they were eating them or living in a tire shelter. They jump on them and play, so I really can’t see an issue here.
thanx for info.hoping to get goats next year will diffentltly follow you