Ah yes, the two genders: Ducks and goats. The only two animals anyone with any sense of taste keep nowadays. Goats and ducks are incredibly different animals, and it an be tough to figure out whether they’ll be able to work together.
Goats and Ducks can live together, as long as their keeper is ready to step in and prevent any mishaps from hurting either of them. However, if the goats are medicated or the ducks are nesting (or have ducklings,) they should probably be seperated.
Great news! All of your beautiful animals can live in the same pen. But what work needs to done to keep them living happily, and what benefits do keeping them together actually give?
Goats And Ducks: Worst Enemies?
There are a few things that you need to be watching out for if you’re keeping goats and ducks together that you wouldn’t usually need to think about.
Water
Goats and ducks have very different approaches to their water needs. Ducks love to wallow in dirt and then go for a swim. Goats need water to be perfectly fresh in order for them to want to drink it.
This means that the ducks need to have their own water that they can use for themselves, or else they will ruin all the water for your goats.
You can help with this by making sure that your goats water is high enough up that the ducks can’t reach it if your goats are tall enough, but if not you’ll need to change their water every time that the ducks get into it.
Food
While the goats will eat all of their own food fairly quickly, they will also eat anything else that happens to be both edible and nearby. This means duck food.
If you pour food for the ducks and the goats are nearby, there’s a good chance that the goats will come try and bully it away from them.
This is a really bad thing, since goats aren’t omnivorous like ducks are. This means that much of what is food for the ducks will actually be poison for the goats.
You can avoid this becoming a problem making sure that the ducks are fed only in a space that the goats can’t really reach.
Ducks will eat whatever of the goats’ feed is left over after the goats are done eating, but ducks are perfectly fine eating goat food, since goats are herbivores.
Medication
Ducks can’t deal with goat medication and vice versa. Goats shouldn’t be eating duck food anyways so that’s not a big deal, but if you’re medicating your goats’ food you can’t really keep them together with ducks.
Ducklings
Duck mothers are highly defensive of both their young and their eggs. Goats are rogues and scoundrels, and will try to mess with the ducklings. When the ducks have young, they need to be kept seperately from goats.
But goats and ducks aren’t always enemies, and in fact the benefits of raising them together can far outweigh the inconveniences.
Ducks And Goats: Best Friends
Ducks and goats benefit each other in all sorts of cool ways. Here’s some things you can look forward to if you keep them both together:
Different Foods
Goats and ducks are incredibly different animals, and nowhere is this more easily apparent than in their diets. Goats can’t digest anything that isn’t plant matter, and there are all sorts of bugs that goats can actually die from accidentally ingesting.
Ducks, on the other hand, absolutely love to eat bugs. In fact, keeping ducks with your goats is a great way to protect the ducks from being poisoned by those owful little things.
If you’re careful about keeping duck feed away from the goats, then you also don’t need to worry about the goats eating all the food for both of them. The ducks will also eat any leftovers that the goats drop on the ground, which can keep away dangerous pests like rats or mice.
Different Parasites
Because ducks and goats are such different creatures, the bugs that feed off of them are extremely unlikely to pass between them. That means that your ducks and your goats are significantly less likely to get each other sick than, say, goats and sheep.
This also means that your ducks can eat the parasites that the goats pass, preventing them from being able to pass on to other goats. In conjunction with frequent de-worming, this can help your goats stay much healthier than they otherwise would, a huge benefit for animals that are as bad at repelling parasites as goats are.
Friendship
Goats and ducks make great friends, and that’s just a good thing in general! Goats are very social creatures, so they are usually a lot happier when they have more other creatures around to keep them company.
Obviously, ducks aren’t a substitute for having more goats in the pen. Goats need to have other goats around or they’ll get depressed. But it certainly doesn’t hurt to have some cute little ducks around to live things up a bit.
Adoreable
Animal friendships? They’re so very cute. And since ducks and goats can get along together pretty easily, you will have the fantastic opportunity to watch them get into all sorts of excellent hijinks.
I’d definitely say that this particular advantage outweighs every single problem That keeping goats and ducks together could possibly cause.
What Do You Need To Do?
Your own duties are fairy simple, and ultimately probably something that you wanted to do anyways: You need to watch the goats and ducks hang out together.
Them most important thing is that you make sure they aren’t causing too much trouble for one another and that they are getting along amicably.
This is super important for the reasons discussed in the first section. There are a lot of risks when it comes to raising two different kinds of animal together, but for goats and ducks it can absolutely be worth it if you are willing to put in the work.