People seem to love showing off things and animals. Goats are no exception which means there are goat shows.
These events occur in Dora’s Story. Emily’s mother wants the recognition of winning them. The girls want to take part as members of their 4-H club. There are two big shows close to them and they attend both.
Why Have Goat Shows?
I only took my goats to the local county shows. I led a couple of 4-H goat Projects and the shows were part of this.
We held the shows for several reasons. One was for the members to show off their goats. More importantly the judges could help them recognize the strong and weak points of their goats.
The public was the other big reason for holding these little shows. Many people know little about goats and many times what they know is wrong.
This isn’t their fault. Goats are fun to make fun of. Brush goats do tend to have long goatees and big horns. Goats do butt each other and other things. Horns are a great way to tear delicious bark off of trees.
Buck goats (male goats in the dairy goat world) do reek during mating season. Does (female goats in the dairy goat world) do not.
If produced properly, goat milk tastes good. It is also better balanced for human consumption than cow’s milk.
Dora’s Story Goat Shows
The shows in this novel are much bigger shows. I have attended several of these bigger shows as a spectator.
These shows have several goat breeds and several classes for each breed. There are showmanship classes for young goat owners.
In plotting these shows for the novel, I had to list all of the classes, all of the goats in each of the classes and the names and ages of the owners of these goats. This took at least a page of notes.
To complicate this, the same shows occur annually. They show up more than once in the novel. That meant aging the owners and their goats, adding some new owners and goats.
Much of this material was not used in the novel. Emily and her sister showed Nubians and grades only. But they did talk to many of the other owners.
Novel background notes are like that. The notes make writing the novel easier and the result better. But that doesn’t mean all of the notes appear in the novel.