Life is subtle in the ways it tricks and traps you. Take my morning chores for example. I had been tasked with feeding, providing water for, and milking the goats. Distribute feed between 3 buckets so they don’t trample each other trying to funnel 10+ heads into one receptacle. Provide some hay for them to snack on throughout the day. Fill the trough. Okay, that’s all easy enough. Then follows the milking.

It’s as fun as they are cooperative. Which is to say, not much at all. There are 4 in total to milk, and they do not seem to like me at all. I wouldn’t like someone who only approaches to lead me by the collar to a headlocking table (stanchion) either, but I was only following instruction.

So many mornings have been cornering goats and trying to keep my grip as they want to go any direction but the milking room. Once on the milking table, they seem pretty passive until they decide to kick at your hands, flinging muck about the room.

Why were they so randomly hostile? I’m working as I was told but seem to be having 10 times the trouble! Which isn’t all too surprising, I am new to this. So instead of continuing to wonder, I asked why they seem to be so resistant of the processes they have been going through long before I arrived.

“They’re not suddenly being stubborn, they know they can be the boss off you.”

The boss of me? I am a human! We escaped the food chain! To contrast that reality, I personally know people interested in purchasing some of the goats to spit over a fire. They are means to an end, and that end is the contribution to human consumerism. They don’t know how to get to their food half the time if it’s moved, let alone their ultimate fate.

And look at us! We’ve risen above the day-to-day survival that the animal kingdom is ultimately resigned to. We’ve wandered all over the planet and claimed the alpha position in just about every tendril of human inhabitance. Society has not only been conceptualized and established, but rocketed past, literally, into the the lofty realms science and technology has taken us!

Physics, philosophy, industry, mankind is the nigh-undisputed champion of this planet, with exception to the realm of sickness and disease that we’re constantly researching and learning about to the extent that some diseases are practically non existent thanks to the advent of products like vaccines!

We’ve reduced once-fatal diseases into mild inconveniences, and a freakin’ goat is my boss?

Apparently so. It’s not like I personally engineered any of the stated human achievements, I just happened to be born at a time where I get to enjoy things as they are. And enjoy learning things, like the properties of light, or what it means to be whipped by a goat and then how to properly care for them. Perspective is a powerful thing.

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