Hi Reg here.
That ‘Goat in Sheep’s Clothing’ in the title, doesn’t refer to me, by the way.
I’m just a dog in a scarf.
But it occurred to me that the Old Girl may not have been right when she said the animals that she and the Young’un rescued, were goats. She said you can tell the difference between goats and sheep by looking at their tails and seeing whether they stick up or hang down, but she was a bit hazy about which was which.

I’ve checked the photo and the young ones look like lambs whereas the mum looks like a goat to me.
But what would I know?
I’m not a sheep dog. Or a goat dog.
Anyway, I decided to do what everyone does nowadays when they want to know anything, I googled it. Unfortunately, it took me much longer to find anything about goats and sheep than I’d anticipated. I thought googling was supposed to give you a quick answer.
And it probably does, if you google.
Unfortunately, I goggled.
Well, typing is hard when you’ve only got paws and ‘Goggle’ is fairly similar to ‘Google’.
Anyway, I finally found Google and did my search. The first site I came to, told me that sheep are ‘tubbier’ than goats. Well, that’s fine when you’re trying to separate sheep from goats – just sort them by size. But when you’ve only got one type, that’s not very helpful.

The second difference was that “sheep have wool and goats don’t“. It didn’t actually say what it is that goats have, so I was none the wiser and went on to the third difference. “In the west sheep meat is eaten whereas in the Middle East and the Indian sub continent a goat is eaten.”

I was still completely in the dark.

Were there any more differences which would help me? Apparently, there were. The helpful site told me that “Sheep belong to the Ovas Aries species and have 54 chromosomes while goats belong to Capra Hircus species and have 60 chromosomes.”

I kicked myself heartily for not having counted the animals’ chromosomes while I’d had the chance and then carried on reading “A goat’s tail for most part stands up while a sheep’s hangs down.” So there you have it. We’d rescued some sheep… Except that they looked like goats and the site does say that ‘ a goat’s tail for the most part stands up’ and I wonder whether for this part, they all just temporarily drooped.

So, I’m still not convinced.

It made me think though. I wonder if the goat/sheep mum took one look at me and thought “Oh heck! Wolf or dog?”

I decided to search the same site to find out the difference between dogs and wolves – on her behalf. And I found a lot of information about teeth, legs and feet but quite frankly, if you come across an animal in the wild and want to find out its identity by checking its teeth, it would probably bite you. If you checked my teeth, I might bite you too.
I read on and then found this:

“Wolf is considered to be cleverer than the dog and wolves are more conscious of their surroundings than the dogs. Dog barks while a wolf only howl , however dogs easily learns to howl and wolf can only make a sharp muffled sounding bark but wolves rarely do this. Wolves always love to be in crowd, even if it is a group of two or more. But dogs do not used to live in groups and they time and time again are seen combating one another.”

Cleverer than a dog? I don’t think so! And I love being in a crowd – I’m a total party animal.
But it got me wondering, perhaps I’m really a wolf.

Or perhaps, as the Old Girl once said, “You can’t believe everything you read on the Internet.”

But, here’s something that is on the Internet and you can believe it. The Old Girl’s ebook, ‘Daffodil and the Thin Place’ is for sale on the Muse It Up Publishing website here as well as all major ebook retailers and you can buy a copy – or two if you like. It’s definitely an ebook, so you won’t need to check whether it’s anything different. Honestly – on my word as a wolf/dog.