I’m taking a contemplative photography class. It’s a Buddhist program where we are practicing seeing with a fresh mind. We get a lot of interesting assignments, and this is a picture I took to fulfill one of them.
What I want to talk about here is the eyeballs of goats. This photo is of Sugar - one of our ex-goat yoga goats. Goat yoga teaches baby goats to jump on humans. Which is delightful when the kids are a week old and weigh five or six pounds. Not so delightful, however, when the goats are a few months older and well on their way to their adult weight of nearly a hundred pounds. Which is how we got Sugar and her pal Ray.
In any case, the close-up of Sugar’s eyeball allows us to notice how bizarre goats’ eyes are. A lot of people are disturbed by goats’ eyes. But in fact, many animals have pupils that are not round like humans’. Cuttlefish have pupils shaped like the letter “W”. Dolphins’ pupils are crescent-shaped.
Most animals, though, have pupils that are either vertical, horizontal, or round. The evolutionary needs of the animals determine the shape of their eyeballs. The vertical slits are most common in ambush predators. Our housecats have vertical slits. These animals need to be able to judge distance from their prey. Vertical slits are ideal for that.
Of course, the vertical slits are only necessary for the shorter animals, like foxes and housecats. Wolves, lions, and tigers have round pupils.
If you’re a prey animal, on the other hand, you need pupils that help you see on all sides of you in order to evade your predators. Hence the horizontal pupils of goats, sheep, and many horses. Goats can see nearly 320-340 degrees.
Another amazing thing about goats’ horizontal pupils is that, even when they lower their heads to graze, their spectacular eyeballs compensate so that the goats can still maintain their panoramic view.
Oh, and the cuttlefish’s W-shape pupils help them cope with the uneven light levels in their underwater habitat, where there’s a lot of light near the surface, but much less further down in the deep.
Before I forget, I want to post a photo of our completed chicken coop:
Yes, we stenciled pink chickens on the side. I could not be more delighted.
This week, when Kat and I went out to socialize the baby goats, we noticed a chicken out in the chicken wilderness running away from the other chickens. She seemed to have something in her mouth. We snuck as close to her as we could get. A lizard was dangling from her beak! She ran, dropping the lizard, pecking it, and picking it up and running with it again. She continued until the lizard was dead, and then she began eating him.
In this photo the lizard is already dead and plenty mangled - I hope you can still make him out.
Chickens are omnivores. They eat all kinds of meat and all kinds of plants. They’ll even eat other chickens. They seem particularly sanguine about their own dead. I discovered that last summer after we got our day-old chicks in the mail. The second day we had our new chicks, I went into the room where we were raising them, and saw that one of our babies had died. (It was the only baby we lost). But the weird thing was, she had died next to the baby chick food, so all the living chickens were walking over her and standing on her body as if she wasn’t even there. Completely unperturbed.
On a less grizzly note, this year seems to be a stellar year for roses in New Mexico. At our farm, it’s even more so, because my cousin has been zealously revitalizing her rose bushes. She has some truly amazing plants.
I never thought of roses as plants that were particularly suited to the high desert. So I googled where roses grow. Here’s what I learned: most long-stemmed roses sold in the United States are grown in Ecuador! It turns out that roses grow perfectly straight only at the equator, where the sun shines perpendicular to the plants. Also, the altitude in Ecuador offers a lot of solar radiation to the roses, which gives them thicker stems and vibrant colors.
Here’s one more of Jan’s rose bushes:
And finally, in soap news, the first of our picture bars are finally cured and - with the help of my sister - up on our soap website. I am so excited about these bars. Because of the way we made them, the pictures go all the way through the bars.
Of course, there are more varieties of picture bars coming. Like this:
And this:
But, already you can go to our website and shop for delightful picture bars - which have the same kind-to-your-skin formulation as all our goat milk soaps. Here's a link that will take you right there: https://www.serenasoaps.com/picture-soaps