My former in laws out in the Nevada (a western US State) desert got several young young goats with the idea of having a renewable food supply. Goats are tender and sweet if you ‘harvest’ them young enough.
Nobody told them that young goats are born with springs in their hooves, and it wasn’t long before they could spring over the fence, and then they often went on to spring onto people’s cars, where they sprung up and down, doing a kind of Irish jig on the roofs of the cars. A couple more weeks and the little buggers could spring onto the garage roof, which was flat and attached to the flat barn roof.
It wasn’t too long before they started to spend nights out of their pen, and were eagerly harvested by the coyotes. They would have a little goat or two, then go down to the garden, nose a water melon behind a tumbleweed and have several of the melons for dessert.
Short of roofing the goat pen with a regular wood roof, or working out how to put on and keep up a wire mesh roof on the goat pen, there was no way to keep the goats either safe from the coyotes, and available, catchable, for humans to harvest. Eventually, the coyotes finished off the goats, and no more goats were gotten. They had gone the same way as the peafowl had gone.
Eventually, my ex’s parents learned that if they put a battery-powered radio out in the garden, set to a lively talk show, the coyotes would leave the melons alone. I wonder how many of them sat around the edges of the garden on lovely moon-lit nights, listening to and wondering about the noisy humans who hid in that little box.

® Dayonda Stribling
12:24 19 Aug 2009

P.S.: Am I, or am I not pullin’ yer leg? Ask and I’ll tell you… maybe!