Chomping Cows and Gobbling Goats

So help me, this is a true story - both of them! My friends Ron and Fred moved to San Miguel from Dallas last January. To say they have had "challenges" getting their new home livable would be an understatement. I won't bore you with the gory details but suffice to say, they have REALLY had more stuff go wrong then a dozen people put together. The last straw, almost, happened a couple of weeks ago when they FINALLY were at the stage to have some landscaping on the street in front of their house. It looked really green and pretty - the ground cover and the oleanders - that is til the herd of cows came down out of the mountains and chomped the ground cover. I think they knew the oleanders were poisonous and left them alone. So, not to be outdone, Fred studied and researched and found that putting red hot chili pepper on the new ground cover would deter the cows if they or anything else wild came back. Well, they did come back, the cows............and, you guessed it, they LOVED the pepper on the green ground cover and according to Fred they pulled the plants out by their roots this time. I suggested they buy rocks as a ground cover.....
This episode reminded me of when I first moved here and there was a goat herd that grazed every day in the canyon bottom. A shepherd herded them down in the morning and back up in the evening. Except in the evening, several of the goats didn't want to follow the lead and be taken into a house near me to be milked and they would run all over on the school grounds across the street from me and then would head for the bushes that used to be in front of my house. I and the shepherd would try to shoo them off but it was totally amazing how much those darn goats could gobble so fast. I no longer have large bushes in front of my house. But I also no longer have the goat herd grazing in the canyon either. Darn.