MovieChat Forums > The VVitch: A New-England Folktale (2016) Discussion > Why didn't William just kill the goat?

Why didn't William just kill the goat?


I mean days, maybe even weeks before it gored him?

1 - It didn't really contribute anything to their farm other than hopping around with the twins, escaping from it's pen, and eating food?
2 - The family needed food and I'm sure it would have been satanically delicious.
3 - The twins were being weird with it, the family knew this, and the family was already suspicious of witchery.

What am I missing?



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1 - It didn't really contribute anything to their farm other than hopping around with the twins, escaping from it's pen, and eating food?

2 - The family needed food and I'm sure it would have been satanically delicious.


Black Philip was needed for reproducing with other goats. If they're just going to kill off farm animals like that what's the point of having them?

3 - The twins were being weird with it, the family knew this, and the family was already suspicious of witchery.


The father becomes suspicious later on in the movie and is more suspicious of the kids than the goat.

Before that, they thought Thomasin was saying bunch of nonsense.

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Black Philip was needed for reproducing with other goats.
Well, he did a sh!tty job! Also, if they were genuinely desperate for food and surviving the winter, killing an animal for food would not only provide immediate nourishment, but help preserve food that the animal would otherwise consume itself. They had at least two milking goats in the meantime before BLACK PHILIP KILLED THEM, but I see your point.
If they're just going to kill off farm animals like that what's the point of having them?
Livestock can be bred and kept for eggs/dairy etc., but also to slaughter and eat. Even if slaughter isn't the primary purpose, I would think that it would still be the option once it becomes clear that the animal is troublesome/a burden/satanic...?



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^But that's the point, why kill the goat off if you can get more of them?

And if they really did believe the goat is satanic, why would they eat the meat?

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If you don't know anything about farming, just say so and I will wait for a more farming-competent person to respond.



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So, I take my time answering your question and you act like this? If you know so much more about farming then why do you question why they'd keep a male goat?

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You did your best but clearly we need somebody with more focused farming expertise to weigh in, otherwise we will just keep going around in circles; me saying they should have killed the goat when it became clear that it was doing more harm than good, and you saying they need the goat to make more goats (even though they have some already and IT KILLS THE OTHER GOATS), etc..

When did I say I "know so much more about farming"? I just pointed out that your answer appears to lack comprehension, and therefore I feel it is not satisfactory.



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I am a expert farmer and you sir are right,I referenced my trusty farmers almanac circa 1800s and it is recommended to kill all satanic goats.lol is this thread some weird type of trolls job or misunderstood sarcasm or are you really this oblivious.

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Pretty sure the Farmer's Almanac focuses on weather and gardening, not livestock management. Nice try.



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Why would they keep their only male goat? There are a tons of reasons a poor farming family in the era would keep around a male goat and would refrain from eating the thing.

1. Breeding. Goats breed with each other, so having a couple of nanny goats and one billy means that the family can keep them breeding and either sell the kids off to surrounding farms, raise them and sell them to town for slaughter or keep them for slaughter themselves.

1.a. Milk production. I'm fully aware a billy doesn't produce milk, however, not many people realise that a nanny goat doesn't just automatically produce milk until AFTER she has been bred and birthed a kid - this is the exact same thing with cows and humans - milk only comes when the hormones from the pregnancy kick in during the later stages and only continues to be produced through pumping or suckling). Eventually, the milk does dry up in goats, and when it does, the nannies need to be impregnated again, thus, a billy would need to be around for that to happen.

1.b. Studding.
Billies can be studded out to neighbouring farms who have only nanny goats and need the milk. It wasn't unheard of for farmers to stud their billies out for free to neighbours for rights to the kid after the birth. There were quite a few court battles apparently in the olden days over ownership rights after the kids were born, especially if the kids were female, as female goats were useful for milk and cheese production which could earn coin and maintain the family.

2. Easy/Cheap to Feed. Someone mentioned it would cost a lot to feed the goat but they actually eat a lot of things that don't necessarily need to be supplied through monetary or farming means. They eat trash for one thing...Anything the humans didn't/couldn't eat, food leftovers and scraps, the goats got. They eat shrubs, trees and long grass - the won't mow a field efficiently like sheep do (unlike sheep which stand and graze slowly, goats like to keep moving so their clearing a field usually is sporadic and messy), but they will eat quite a bit of it, especially if contained with no other options available. They were cheap to feed - smaller than cows, which need to eat a tremendous lot every day to keep producing milk.

3. Fertilizer. If a goat is eating a lot of plant matter such as shrubs, trees, grass and grain, they will produce a great quality manure that will highly encourage the growth of crops. Their manure comes out like pellets (much neater than cowpats), the odour is a fraction of cow dung, it doesn't attract flies and insects as much as other manures do and it's gentler on roots (did you know that cow manure can act like acid and actually burn and kill plants if it's potent?). Three goats would certainly be making a better amount of fertilizer than two goats would be and with a farm, they would most definitely not waste a single ounce of it when they have crops that need fed.

4. Pack animal. While the female goats were usually left in a pen to eat their weight every day to produce milk, billies were taken out with their owners to act as a pack animal (especially if the farmer didn't have a horse or ass available on hand). It wasn't unusual to see goats being loaded down with water buckets.

4.a Plough. Billies can be fairly strong - especially the ones that aren't castrated - and their energy levels are through the roof. While it can be hard to control them, it wasn't unheard of to have small ploughs hooked up to the animal to till the fields before planting.

4.b. Cart. Goats can pull small carts, which on a farm could come in handy when dragging around a lot of tools. Lets not forget, these were the days before motor vehicles. When the farmer left to go to his field, it could take several hours to get from one spot to the other, and he'd need to carry a variety of things with him and might not necessarily want to carry them himself. Taking the goat to pull the load in a cart would help, plus the billy would get plenty of exercise, and would get to eat any shrubs or plant life in the neighbouring area he was tethered to while the farmer tended to his business (thus saving the farmer feeding the animal).

5. Fabric. Depending on the breed of goat, it can be trimmed of excess hair. Black Phillip had an excess of hair on his rump and front quarters which would be periodically trimmed and used like wool to create dense hard-wearing fabric such as coats, thick warm blankets and satchels (even today goat hair is still used to make high quality fabrics and is very desirable and expensive). Depending on the hair quality of the goat (which is apparently finer than wool in some cases) the goat hair was more desirable as the fabric would be far softer, yet denser and far warmer than sheep wool.

5.a. Stuffing. As well as using goat hair to make fabric, it was mixed with a variety of other things (such as horse hair) and used to stuff mattresses and pillows. The only real "bed" we see in the film is of thy mother and father, the children are sleeping on thin roll away mattress pads which would have likely been filled with the hair of goats, horses, wool and any down they could get their hands on. It wasn't quite as jagged or noisy as sleeping on mattresses made of straw.

5.b. Insulation. Goat hair is even used in modern times mixed with certain other ingredients to create a perfect density for building insulation. In the olden days, farmers would mix it with thick mud and stuff it into the cracks of brickwork and flooring to create an insulation that apparently, because of the goats hair which was finer and softer, was less likely to crack than using grass or straw for stability. Even in days of old, farmers would mix goat hair and horse hair into their mortar to increase the stability and prevent cracking of the stuff in later years. This is STILL to this day used in lime mortar.


So you see, a male goat would have more than just one particular use to a poor family living off the land outside of civilisation - this is why it would have never occurred to them to ever sell their only male goat. These were desperate people with NO money (and this is clear when William tells Caleb that he had to sell 'Thy mother's silver cup' - they were well and truly skint).

When it came to farming in the olden days, very little was wasted, and almost everything had more than one purpose - especially when you were out in the open with no access to modern conveniences or shops. When living off the land, you had to make every single thing count - every thing, every by product, every animal, it had to have several uses to be worth keeping. A male goat wasn't just a male goat, it was supplying fertilizer, fabric, fertility, and it was likely a working animal.

For anyone wondering, these are all things I've read in fiction and biographies over several years, and for the purpose of the thread, I've done a little of the research since some do seem interested why they wouldn't have just killed Black Phillip or sold him.

While not many will probably be interested, farming is quite a fascinating subject and there is so much involved - especially in the 1700 and 1800s. In the olden days, farmers were usually misunderstood to be uneducated, lazy and stupid when it couldn't have been far from the truth. For one thing these people were rarely ever sat down for a minute - on a farm there is never NOT something to do. Farming needs a lot of education, knowledge of planning, from knowing when to plant (which months work best), knowing how to care for crops, having to know about husbandry and maintain the animals, knowing where to sell, knowing how to preserve crops and use every resource on the land.

I can't imagine how much intelligence and perseverance it took to run a farm in those days when there were no pesticides, no ways of properly predicting the weather, no tractors, no machines and no automatic irrigation. The thought of our ancestors who probably stood out in freezing cold rain or scorching sun back-breakingly digging irrigation ditches, planting by hand, weaving fabrics and churning butters and making cheese....just the amount of pain they were probably in their entire lives (without having access to proper medical care or painkillers) gives me such a new deep respect for them...and gives me such an insight how lucky I am to be sitting here researching on the internet about how hard life was for these people while I sit in a warm house with kettle boiled tea...I have candles lit that I don't NEED to use sparingly for light, just for ambience and the scent. To these people the amount of wax in a large Yankee candle would have probably been akin to the entire amount of wax they could afford in their candles for an entire year!). Really makes me think.

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This is a fabulous answer, and I now consider the matter closed. Thank you very much! Hopefully svalinanikola can now understand why I brushed aside their earlier responses as inadequate...

Farming in old times (in addition to many other things) sounded absolutely miserable; you sure have to respect the efforts and perseverance.



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Thou art a witch thyself, dismal_angel, to defend the Dark One so. Tis he who fed you these 'facts' in the dark of night...CONFESS!

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The other replies were interesting but basically could have ended with the part about the father not having a clue 'til near the end of the movie. A goat being driven by a demon isn't going to be easy to kill, as evidenced by him causing the woodpile to fall on the father as the guy prepared to poleaxe billy.

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William demonstrated early in the film that he can handle the goat, when he took it by the horns and forced it back into the pen. He was just caught by surprise from it on that fateful morning when it gored him.



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Svalinanikola answered very simply what the expert poster answered very precisely but that anyone should know anyways. Dont make svalinanikola out to be the dummy.

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