After that I took a slightly different attitude to goats. At a rare breed farm in East Anglia I watched a Golden Guernsey billy run down to the fence where Catherine was standing and begin lewdly flickering his tongue at her like the singer in a second-rate heavy metal band. I noticed the smell of him, too. It's something you can hardly avoid with goats. Nannies are peculiar enough: they give off an odour of goats' cheese, which is odd, because the same isn't true of other milk-producing animals. You don't come across cows that reek of Stilton. The rasping stink of the billy is something else entirely, though. It's so powerful that it doesn't just make your eyes water, it makes them feel as if somebody is going at them with a scrubbing brush and scouring powder. It seems like the sort of thing dissolute teenagers might sniff for its hallucinogenic effects. If billy goats were a chemical, it would be illegal to handle them without asbestos gloves and a mask. Such a high-powered pong doesn't come easily: the billy really works on it. His favoured method of improving his body musk is to urinate on his own forehead. He does this by standing on a hard surface and lowering his barnet down between his knees. The spray bounces up and lands behind his ears and horns. He undertakes this unpleasant task because he thinks it will make him more attractive to female goats. And the disturbing thing is, he is right. One whiff of the freshly groomed billy and the nannies' knees go to jelly. Girls just love it when a guy takes a bit of trouble with himself. The billy goat has to be careful while at his toilette, though, because his urine has a very high ammonia content and can be harmful if it gets into your eyes. The billy goat is the only animal whose sex drive can make him blind.

Despite, or more likely because of, this rather unpleasant side to their character, goats are easily the most interesting livestock. They were the first farm animal, their main appeal to the Neolithic men who domesticated them being their appetite. Goats will eat anything. In the lexicon of the goat there is no such word as 'edible' since to apply it to anything from cacti to corsets would be tautological and goats are strict and stylish grammarians.

Early man used his goats not just for food but to help clear scrub and woodland prior to cultivation. Goats were very good at this. The Sahara Desert was thickly wooded until Neolithic man sent his vast flocks of goats into it and set off and irreversible spiral of deforestation, soil erosion and dust-bowling. Not until Oppenheimer built the atomic bomb would mankind produce anything capable of devastating the environment more totally than a large group of goats. In fact, it is something of a surprise to me that nobody from the Green Party has ever suggested a huge flock of goats as a natural alternative to Britain's nuclear deterrent. We could keep them in underground silos and in times of difficulty simply parachute them into the enemy's crop fields and refuse to call them off until our opponents surrendered or starved. Of course, there would still be the worry that somebody might push the red button in error, leading to a tit-for-tat scenario in which our mistaken pre-emptive strike on the cabbage fields around Kiev might provoke the retaliatory devastation of Vale of York sugarbeet production by a crack force of Ukranian Cashmeres, but I think that's a small price to pay for peace of mind.

So important were goats to early man that he started to worship them. The Babylonians believed that the Milky Way was an astral nanny goat and their most important god was a billy named Polaris. Polaris later became the only goat in history to have a submarine named after him. A strange choice from the Royal Navy, I think you'll agree, goats not being noted for their ability to swim underwater. The ancient Egyptians, too, held the goat as sacred, though as they also worshipped dung beetles, perhaps that's not such a great honour. The ancient Greeks, meanwhile, viewed the goat as a symbol of male fertility. Whether Greek men followed the lead of the billy goat when it came to titivating themselves is not known, though if they did it would certainly explain why they spent so much time sitting in single-sex groups on mountaintops pondering the meaning of life, and wondering why they never got invited to parties. It was the goat's association with these pagan religions, along with some of its less endearing habits, that earned it its diabolic reuptation in Christian societies.

Prompted by the bearded man's T-shirt, I popped over to the goat tent to have a look at his beloved Anglo-Nubians. A big creature with pendulous ears, a Roman nose and a body whose lumpiness suggests it has just swallowed a wheelbarrow, the Anglo-Nubian, as its name implies, is a cross between native British goats and imported Nubians. The first Nubian goats came to England from Paris, where a flock of them had been kept to supply milk to feed the hippopotamus presented to Napoleon III by the Emperor of Abyssinia.

I was familiar with Nubian goats. When I was a teenager my parents worked in the Middle East for a few years. In the city in which they lived the local council had decided not to bother with dustmen and simply employed a flock of goats to eat the refuse instead. Every few weeks or so, the goats would turn up and wander down the street, munching everything in their path. They were quiet, efficient and never took any time off. In fact, they weren't much like human binmen at all - except one year when we forgot to give them a Christmas box and they came back the following week and slung rubbish all over our garden.

Anglo-Nubians are one of Britain's favourite goats. They produce the richest milk and are particularly popular with cheese- and yoghurt-makers. Goat's milk, incidentally, is the closest in composition to human milk. It is said to be very good for people suffering from TB, ulcers or eczema. As if the poor buggers didn't have enough to put up with.

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