How to keep them safe?

Am going next week to see a goat breeder and to reserve a starter flock. My problem arises because we cant keep them at home, they have to live at the 4H grounds.

The pen is built, the shed is building, the hay cover is going up.

BUT!

The pen is in an isolated area that is VERY easy to get to and the goats are going to be small and valuable.

How do I keep them safe???

What!?! No one has ANY ideas?

Aside of an armed guard, not really sure, lol. Besides, don't think 4H grounds will take kindly to electric fencing. Or, you could do as Billy has on his small holding and keep geese as the early alert system! I've heard pea fowl are marvelous for this as well.

Actually it is the geese that are the most vulnerable on our little patch, I suspect. I worry little about anyone trying to steal the pigs because they are such damn hard work to load into a trailer, the sheep are nigh on impossible to round up without a rifle and the chickens simply aren't worth stealing, but come mid-December you cane get £50-70 for a fat goose, and it would be the work of a couple of minutes to drive a car in, grab a dozen geese and chuck them in the back, dead or alive. Incredibly easy to sell on to pubs or restaurants or on the market and an easy few hundred quid for an unscrupulous rustler. The chap up the road from us who breeds turkeys spends December sleeping in the turkey shed with a shotgun. I know of a charcutier who had more than a hundred Christmas hams stolen one night.
Goats... I would think of as being more in the tricky to catch and less easy to sell on category. Beyond that, no idea.

As tame as these goats are Billy, it would be the work of minutes to have them into a car.

So!

We have decided to risk having the does at home. Tigger will stay at the 4H grounds (we might find a couple of meat goatlings to go with him for company) and we will keep the does in the dog pen and take them daily to graze and have some run time.

I am also going to make them a little playground in the back yard for the days they cant go to graze.

At the end of the day, even with the ordinances against all useful animals in our town I am only risking having to find somewhere else to keep the stealth chickens and the goats and really, its already there at 4H. If an enforcement officer gets wind of them we will be given 30 days to get them gone. Well, it will take an hour or two to move them so its worth the risk of having them safe at home.

Of course, hubby doesnt know yet that they are going to be living with us

*sigh* Why is it that spouses so often dont understand what drives us