"...Goats that Blight the Plants..."

While working my way through the middle of Book 2 of the Georgics, I encountered the following passage:

Sin armenta magis studium vitulosque tueri,
aut ovium fetum aut urentis culta capellas

But if your business is rather the keeping of herds
and calves, or breeding sheep, or goats that blight the plants...

(II.195-196; trans. Fairclough)

I shared the translation with Shelly yesterday in the car, and we both got to wondering: how (or perhaps why) do goats "blight" plants? So I searched several internet sources, and here are three interesting points about goats that help to explain the reference:

• The domestic goat (capra aegagrus hircus) is a "subspecies" of goat that originates from the wild goat of Southwest Asia and Eastern Europe. Capella is the Latin word for a female goat (a "nanny" or "doe" goat).
  

• There are over 300 breeds of domestic goats, and they all like to eat. Lucky Penny is home to just three: Nubians (also called Anglo-Nubian), LaManchas, and Alpine Dairy. The last of the three is the type of goat featured on their product label:
  ....okay, maybe this doesn't help explain the reference, but I'm trying to tie things together here...
  

• Goats are "browsers," not "grazers," like cattle or sheep. This means that they "will chew on and taste just about anything resembling plant matter." So this more or less explains the reference in the Georgics. One web site I came across had the following to say:

"Invasive herbivores can cause great damage. For example, goats were introduced by sailors to many remote oceanic islands during the age of European seafaring exploration, to provide a source of food when the islands were revisited. Goats introduced to the island of St. Helena in the 16th century eliminated over half the endemic plant species." (source)

I've been reading the Georgics with an alertness for anything related to goats, and this is the first strange thing I find. But now that I've looked into an explanation of it, I do recall something vague that I saw as a kid--either in a cartoon or a comic strip--which stereotypes a goat eating a tin can. Maybe this is it (?):


I'll keep reading the Georgics, and hopefully Vergil will continue to teach me about goats. But in the meantime, feel free to print out and color the image above...