Goat's cheese we are becoming used to, goat's milk not so much. An old timer remembers his grandmother, on the basis that goat milk was never tainted with TB germs, buying one and milking it herself. That is, until the goat, while being milked knocked her over and she cut herself badly on a sharp stone. The goat had to go, and the family, living on the edge of the city was back to cow milk poured from a dubious tin by the local milkman into your jug. No TT (tuberculin-tested) milk then, in clean bottles.
Anyway, William Cobbett, in his book Cottage Economy, was a great advocate of the goat. He writes that when he was in the (British) army in New Brunswick, where, he says, the snow lies on the ground for seven months in the year, there were many goats belonging to the regiment and went about with it on shipboard and everywhere else. "Some of them had gone through nearly the whole of the American War. We never fed them. In summer they picked about wherever they could find grass, and in winter they lived on cabbage leaves, turnip peelings, and other things flung out of the soldiers' rooms and huts."
He did well out of a goat that belonged to him. Over the year she gave him, on average, more than three halfpints a day. He used to have the kid killed when a few days old; and for some time he would get "nearly or quite" two quarts of milk a day. She was seldom dry more than three weeks in a year. "Goats will eat almost anything," he tells us: and lists mouldy bread or biscuits; fusty hay and almost rotten straw; furze bushes (why not?) heath, thistles, and, he would have us believe, "they will even eat paper, brown or white, printed on or not printed on."
Hardy things. "When sea voyages are so stormy as to kill geese, ducks, fowl, and almost pigs, the goats are well and lively; and when a dog of no kind can keep the deck for a minute, a goat will skip about upon it as bold as brass." Is Cobbett having us on? You well may ask. He goes on to praise the fact that they don't ramble from home. Call them in the evening and they will come in like dogs. Tough, too; a goat will face a dog and unless he's a very big and courageous one, beat him off.
Certainly the TB-free aspect of the milk was important at the time when the disease was rampant. A friend says an old sea captain whose son had died of TB, forever after lived on, and gave his guests only, goat's milk. PS. It does tend to eat the bark of your trees. Have it outside, but on a chain.