The Great Goat War of Southern France
SAINT-ANDRÉ-DE-ROQUELONGUE, France — Valérie Corbeaux lives on a rocky hilltop in the dry southwest part of France with her herd of goats.
She doesn’t butcher them or use their milk for cheese. Instead, the former Parisian walks with them, feeds them hay and stays up all night in an ancient stone barn to comfort them when they are sick. They are living creatures, she says, no less worthy of love or freedom than humans.
The problem is the goats keep breeding.
And roaming farther afield, scrambling up onto regional highways and into distant vineyards, where they have been known to nibble on the leaves of vines that form the region’s economic lifeline — Corbières wine.
After they munched through two hectares of Julie Rolland’s Vermentino vines in 2020, she called Corbeaux and tried to resolve the issue the country way — woman to woman, agriculturalist to agriculturalist, enthusiast to enthusiast.
Rolland is a former optometrist who took over her parents’ vineyard soon after her mother died. For her, the vines offer more than a vocation — they pulse with personal history.
That first year, Corbeaux’s insurance paid for her goats’ damage. Since then, Corbeaux lost her insurance and the problem has grown.
“The problem isn’t the goats; the problem is the person who doesn’t oversee them,” said Rolland, 42, who compares her daily ritual of phoning one local authority after another to an issue of the French comic book series “Astérix.”
“We are trapped in a pathetic caricature of French administration,” Rolland said. “I want to scream all the time. There are laws! What are they waiting for?”
Now that spring has arrived, her calls have become more urgent. If the goats eat her vineyards’ tender buds, Rolland will lose more income and more heritage.
“I’m alone. I can’t patrol all the land,” she said. “Should I buy a gun and take care of it myself? You start thinking crazy things.”
This is a story about French liberty and bureaucracy. It is about different visions of the countryside and nature. It’s about fire management, fights between neighbors and Brigitte Bardot. But mostly, it is about goats.
No one knows exactly how many goats are in Corbeaux’s herd. From atop her homestead, which is about 20 miles from Narbonne, Corbeaux says there are 500.
Down in the vineyards below, her neighbors say many have gone wild and multiplied. A recent weekend survey estimated “at least 600,” said Stéphane Villarubias, director of the region’s national forestry office. The problem is they are hard to count — “they pass like clouds and disappear into the woods,” he added. “We aren’t sure if there are many herds now.”
One thing everyone agrees on: There are too many for one person to control.
“It’s too much work,” said Corbeaux, calling even 500 “enormous.” At 55 years old, she said, she has heart problems from exhaustion.
“For three years, I’ve been asking for help for my billy goats.”
Corbeaux wasn’t born a shepherd. She grew up in Paris’ gritty 10th Arrondissement and ran a computer-software company. At 30, she had an epiphany. “I was earning a lot of money, I was working a lot and I didn’t have the time to spend it,” she recalled. “I said: ‘A life like this is worthless. I want to be useful.’”
She moved close to Avignon, in southern France, determined to work as an energy healer. But then she clapped eyes on two baby goats at a medieval fair.
“I was hypnotized,” she said. To buy them, she bartered an electric cooler — worth 500 euros — that she had just purchased to start a new job selling wine.
The two became five, then 40. She abandoned all plans of work and cared for them full time. “They are just my babies,” said Corbeaux, spreading hay around a section of her stone barn crowded by her adult female goats that she counts at 52, not including the wobbly legged kid born an hour earlier. “I would die for my goats.”
She spent years moving, looking for the ideal place where her goats could “be effective and useful,” she said, “and I could care for them and give them the most natural life possible.”
Finally, through a stroke of luck, she found her current farmhouse and barn on 680 hectares of mostly uninhabited scrubland and settled in. By then, she had 70 goats.
Goats were once common in the bushy, uninhabited area known as the “garrigue.” They were considered living fire retardants because they nibbled flammable shrubs and shortened dry grass, said Luc Castan, mayor of nearby Roquefort-des-Corbières, whose father raised his village’s last herd in the 1970s, and who fought to reintroduce them last summer as flames ripped through the region. “The fires started once the goats left,” he said.
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