CREATURE COMFORT: FEEDING TIME MAKES ANIMAL OWNER FEEL GOOD

Raindrops on roses was one of Maria von Trapp's favorite things. Feeding animals is one of Dr. Edwin Smith's.

"They love to be fed," says the owner of Amity Hills Farm. "They come out at the end of the day demanding my attention. They make me feel so important."

These days he is feeling important indeed.

When Smith returned home from a meeting at Lake of the Ozarks in March, he discovered an explosion of African pygmy goats in his barn. His 12 nannies had given birth to 22 babies. Counting his billy goat, he suddenly had 35 goats.

Smith is an art education professor at Southeast who also owns Vincill Specialty Feeds, 900 W. Cape Rock Drive. Cape Girardeau's only animal feed store, the business has been located for the past five years in the former Juden School #1, built in 1854.

Two weeks ago, Smith brought his goats the 4 miles from his farm to the feed store, hoping to thin the numbers. Now they have dwindled to 23. Other people like pygmy goats, too.

The goats occupy the pen on the east side of the store. Buford, a standard-size donkey whose hee-haw reverberates through the trees, is in the pen on the opposite side along with two new girlfriends.

Though the goats are the store's main attraction these days, Buford usually gets most of the attention. He hangs out in a fancy shed that was supposed to cost $250 and wound up $9,000 higher.

His farm is more of a menagerie. Among the 85 animals are 14 Sicilian donkeys and pot-bellied pigs named Louise and Lulu. In the 115-year-old barn are about 150 members of the poultry family, including chickens and geese. He also keeps pigeons and doves.

For pets he has cats and kittens, two Great Pyrenees named Benjamin and Mickey and a deaf mutt named Dandy.

At one time Smith kept ostriches, Brahman cattle and llamas. He just sold four pot-bellied pigs to a petting zoo. Ditto, a pygmy jack kept at the farm, commands a $400 stud fee.

Helped him through tragedy

He has found animals a comfort when human tragedies occur. His wife, Janet, died just last month. She had been sick awhile but was waiting to find a liver donor when her liver suddenly shut down.

In 1990, the Smiths' daughter, Carrie, was a passenger in a vehicular accident that injured her spinal cord, leaving her a partial paraplegic.

In both instances, having animals that need feeding helped him.

"I can forget what day of the week it is," he said.

Carrie is now a kindergarten teacher in Nashville, Tenn., who water-skis, snow-skis, rides horses and canoes.

Smith's other daughter, Tracy, is a home health care worker and mother who lives in East Cape Girardeau, Ill.

Both daughters and Paige, his 6 1/2-year-old granddaughter, are "crazy about animals," Smith says. "When Carrie comes home she goes to the farm first thing."

Smith grew up on a farm.

"This animal thing is part of my heritage," he says. As a kid he showed livestock at the famed American Royal Livestock, Horse Show and Rodeo in Kansas City.

Growing up in rural Northern Missouri, he attended a one-room schoolhouse just like the one his feed store occupies. Though his high school didn't offer art classes, in college he studied to become an art professor and sculptor.

He opened the store because he was having trouble getting feed for the llamas on his farm. Now he has feed for all his animals.

It is not true that goats will eat anything, Smith says. "They are very picky. But they don't mind eating paper."

One thing he especially likes about feeding animals is the way feeding "gentles" them down.

"I just dearly love to feed animals," he said.