A farmer has a very special friendship with a goat that was abandoned by its mother. The goat was even allowed to accompany the man on vacation.
A Canadian farmer traveled through the Canadian countryside with his five-month-old billy goat for over two weeks. According to CBC, Jimmy, a five-month-old billy goat, endured the journey with his owner, Hector Aubertin. The farmer had raised the young animal as a surrogate mother after its birth, after the mother goat rejected the baby goat.
The animal had difficulty feeding from its mother due to its congenital underbite. “The mother had two other children, so she more or less took care of those two and rejected him right away. So I’ve been bottle-feeding him since he was born,” Aubertin told CBC.
Despite his best efforts, Aubertin was never able to successfully reunite Jimmy with his birth family. “But then the mother gets wind of it… and then she basically just shoves him into a corner with the horns. It’s brutal,” the CBC report said.
After about a week, Aubertin and Jimmy developed a close bond. “I literally can’t go anywhere without him or he’ll just start mowing. He wants to know where I am. He needs me,” Aubertin told CBC.
The bond between the goat and the farmer went so far that Aubertin had to take Jimmy with him on a two-week road trip from St. Stephen to Edmonton. Aubertin originally had no intention of taking Jimmy on his vacation, but the baby goat insisted on being by his side, he reports in the CBC interview.
He set up the back of his truck as a goat pen, complete with blankets and a box of hay. Jimmy, however, preferred to sit in the passenger seat, the farmer says: “For the first few days, he was kind of mad at [my daughter] because he had to sit in the back seat. And you could tell, because every time he got out, he would go over to her and nudge her or try to chew on her hair.”
Jimmy gained national attention and popularity during the trip. “Everywhere we go, people are amazed,” Aubertin told the CBC. “He’s probably been photographed over 100 times.”
As the farmer tells CBC, the goat was well received by most people during his journey. Aubertin found many pet-friendly motels willing to take in a horned guest and was often surprised by how many businesses let him in with Jimmy. “He listens very well,” Aubertin said. “He’s like a dog, but twice as funny and just a little harder to train.”
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