[Compiled during my tenure as Head Honcho of Zero Per Gallon]
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August, 2009: A Minnesota woman, caught with a shaved, spraypainted, tied-up goat in the trunk of her car, is charged with animal cruelty.
March, 2009: Assemblyman Gregory Ball, known for promoting animal rights legislation, finds a dead goat on his doorstep in Patterson, NY.
January, 2009: Police in Lagos, Nigeria detain a goat, claiming it is actually a transformed armed robber who tried to steal a Mazda 323.
January, 2009: Acclaimed New York Times war journalist Dexter Filkins writes a dispatch from Afghanistan about the ancient sport of Buzkashi, in which three teams of men on horseback in a dusty field compete to 1) scoop up the 70-lb carcass of a frozen, beheaded, disemboweled goat; 2) gallop around a pole 75 yards away with it; and 3) race back to their goal with it still in their possession. Each goal is worth 1 point, and games often go to 30. Basically, Filkins writes, it’s like “polo played with a dead animal.”
September, 2008: During a “routine jail visit” in Kinshasa, Deputy Justice Minister Claude Nyamugabo discovers one dozen incarcerated goats, and orders them released.
April, 2008: A resident in Maple Lane, Georgia observes a goat dancing on top of his car.
February, 2008: Health inspectors in Chicago force the TBS African Restaurant to shut down on account of bad goat meat, among other things.
December, 2007: As part of a 41-year-old Christmas tradition, residents in Gavle, Sweden, construct a a 40-foot-tall, 4-ton straw goat; and to protect it (in its 41 incarnations, the goat has been destroyed 28 times — 22 times by burning, and 6 by sabotage or crashing a car into it) they impregnate it with a waterproof/snowproorf flame retardant, monitor it via a webcam, and post guards overnight to protect it from vandals. The Christmas goat survives.
November, 2007: Tracey Arnold, a 26-year-old Australian woman, is fined, forced to undergo psychiatric treatment, and instructed by a court to apologize for getting drunk at a Friday the 13th party, stealing a goat, breaking into a church, slaughtering the goat in a satanic ritual inside the church, taking some photos of her friends and the detached goat head, and then putting the detached goat head in her freezer. Arnold’s lawyer tells the court that “when she drank alcohol she made poor decisions.”
September, 2007: The Goat Justice League successfully lobbies Seattle lawmakers to amend the land-use code to legalize goats in town as long as they’re dehorned, neutered, and kept in yards. Upon the bill’s unanimous approval, Seattle Councilmember Richard Conlin, who sponsored the bill, says, “One small step for man, one giant step for goatkind.”
April, 2007: Sony Computer Entertainment apologizes for a publicity stunt promoting the launch of the PlayStation game God Of War II, in which guests at an event were invited to reach inside the still-warm carcass of a decapitated goat and eat offal from its stomach.
May, 2007: According to the New York Times, “It is a battle of man versus goat” on the Galapagos Islands, where park officials and the Charles Darwin Foundation are struggling to exterminate 140,000 goats with semiautomatic rifles, one million rounds of US-imported ammunition, exploding bullets, goat-sniffing dogs, and goat snipers in helicopters.
September, 2006: a Swiss man, caught in Ontario going 100mph in a 60mph zone, tells police that he was merely “taking advantage of the ability to drive fast without hitting a goat.”
August, 2006: After a Sudanese man by the name of Tombe is caught having sex with a goat, he is forced by the local council of elders to pay a dowry of 15,000 Sudanese dinars and to take the goat as his wife.