“Upon Scrofa’s four considerations which relate to the care of goats I have this to say.  The flock is better stabled in the winter if its quarters look toward the Southeast, because goats are very sensitive to cold.  So also, as for most cattle, the goat stable should be paved with stone or brick that the flock may be less exposed to damp and mud.  When the flock passes the night out of doors, a place should be selected having the same exposure and the fold strewn with leaves to protect the flock from fouling themselves.

“There is not much difference in the method of handling goats in the pasture from sheep, but goats have this characteristic, that they prefer the mountain woodland pastures to meadows, for they feed eagerly on the brushwood and in cultivated places crop the shrubbery; indeed, their name caprae is derived from carpere, to crop.  For this reason it is customary to stipulate in farm leases that the tenant shall not graze any goat on the leased land, for their teeth are the enemies of all planted crops:  wherefore the astrologers were careful to station them in the heavens outside of the pale of the twelve signs of the zodiac, but there are two kids and a goat not far from Taurus.

“So far as concerns breeding, it is the custom to separate the bucks from the pastured flock at the end of autumn and confine them apart, as has been said with respect to rams.  The nannies which conceive at this time drop their kids in four months, and so in the spring.  In what regards rearing the kids, it is enough to say that when they are three months old they are raised and may join the flock.  What shall I say of the health of these animals who never have any? yet the flock master should have written down what remedies are used for certain of their maladies and especially for the wounds which often befall them by reason of their constant fighting among themselves and their feeding in thorny places.  It remains to speak of number:  this is less to the herd in the case of goats than with sheep because of the wantonness and wandering habit of the goat:  sheep, on the other hand, are wont to flock together and keep in one place.

“For another reason it is the custom in Gaul to divide the goats into many flocks rather than concentrate them in large ones, because a pestilence quickly takes possession of a large herd and sweeps it to destruction.  About fifty goats is considered to be a large enough flock.

“The experience of Gaberius, a Roman of the equestrian order, will illustrate the reason for this:  for he, who had a thousand jugera of land near Rome, met one day a certain goatherd leading ten goats to town, and heard him say that he made a denier[126] a day out of each goat, whereupon Gaberius bought a thousand goats, hoping that he might thereby derive from his property an income of a thousand deniers a day:  but so it fell out that he lost all his goats after a brief illness.  On the other hand, among the Sallentini and near Casinum they graze their goats in flocks of one hundred.