Chinese Zodiac 羊yáng--The Role Model for Respecting the Elders, or not?

羊yáng ：Goat (1907, 1919, 1931, 1943, 1955, 1967, 1979, 1991, 2003)

羊yáng is the pictographic form of the animal goat, as the two dots on top of the character indicate the horns. The character now applies to both goat and sheep.

A goat (and/or sheep) is normally a gentle animal. When we think about goat and sheep, the picture will be a nice vast oily green meadow, patched with nice white puff of soft clouds bathing under the golden sunlight with breeze gently stroking through the earth. Something that would make a brave gladiator doze off during the battle of life and death. That is normally how the goat/sheet represents: an easy, relaxed, trouble free paradiso.

So are the people who are born in the years of the goat. They are mostly gentle, easy to get along with, obedient, quite and with great endurance. The Chinese astrologists also comment that the goat people tend to have similar softness in appearances - a great feature for women, but BAAAAD for men. Softness in appearances is indeed not quite conventional for a man's feature.

Anyway. Gentle as goat and sheep may be, like their domestic animal family ox and cow, when evoked into anger, goat and sheep can also be very stubborn and dangerous. Although sheep and goat are much smaller than ox and cow, they still have horns and powerful hooves that can really inflict pain and injury. When a goat person is seriously irritated, they also would not yield and they would definitely cause damage. Just remember that cotton candies may be fluffy and sweet, but all that sweetness is actually wrap around a sharp and hard stick. So don't bite down on them too hard.

There is an interesting myth in the Chinese society that honors sheep and goat as the model of showing great respect and obedience to parents. When the cubs are fed from the mothers, they would kneel down on their front legs to suckle on the mother's breasts. This position is interpreted by the Chinese as kneeling down with respect and gratitude to the mothers' nursing. Even though this interpretation is rather a myth than reality, goat people that I know actually tend to treat their elders with more respect.  But I will leave that to you.

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