Jonny Waldman, who writes with his nose so that both hands are free to fend off goats, hereby offers MAJOR GOAT NEWS.
*** MGN (Major Goat News) ***
January, 2012: Oregon resident Hunter Goldberg, descendant of William the Conquerer, tries to steal a goat so that he can sacrifice it on New Year's Eve, but is foiled by police, who discover two machetes in his car and charge him with conspiracy. Ten police officers in Khatmandu, Nepal, are accused of stealing, killing, and butchering goats, then selling the meat, thereby turning a police station into a "goat slaughterhouse." A goat named Izak, in Dover, New Hampshire, bites Jon Huntsman on the knee. A fugitive goat named Curly, in Fergus Falls, Minnesota, is found on a farm 25 days after fleeing a nativity scene. A mountain lion in Oak Glen, CA sneaks into a petting zoo and kills 13 goats. Three high school students in El Dorado Springs, Missouri, steal, beat and kill three goats. A dog in South Devon, England, attacks and kills five pet goats. Wild dogs in Uganda's Nakaseke district kill at least 200 goats. A barn fire in Fort Myers, Florida kills 15 goats. A virus in Karachi, Pakistan kills more than 30 goats. A Tucson meteorologist claims to have spotted the mythical Chupacabra, or goat sucker, though no goats are reported injured or killed.
December, 2011: Prosecutors charge 33-year-old Nick Ashline with three felonies for hiring an assassin to kill two goats belonging to Vermont state game warden Steve Majeski, who had earlier investigated Ashline for illegally shooting a deer. Researchers in England, studying the reproductive habits of wild Italian male goats, determine that they (the goats) "can have fun in their youth, or enjoy their old age, but they can’t do both." Two goats in Martinsville, Virginia die after being bitten by a skunk. After 34-year old Zimbabwe man is caught having sex with a goat, he is ordered to pay its dowry and marry it.
November, 2011: The Depatment of Agriculture announces it will abandon its annual goat census. Ryanair CEO Michael O'Leary announces that passengers to Greece can pay for flights with goats. Three pit bulls sneak into a goat pen in Los Angeles and kill 42 goats. A man in Davis, CA kills 15 goats by driving into a herd of them. Cellist Yo-Yo Ma teams up with thee bluegrass musicians to perform the Goat Rodeo Sessions, though neither a goat nor a rodeo is involved.
October, 2011: Theodore, the grand-prize winning goat at the Colorado State Fair, is disqualified for doping. Zottel and Mimu, goat mascots of the right-wing Swiss People's Party, are kidnapped, tied to a tree, and painted black. A small French medical study links exposure to goats with a five-fold increase in P-ADC lung cancer. Confounding all who study evil, Jim Welch is developing a Nintentdo game called Goats vs. Nazis.
September, 2011: The 2011 World Championship BBQ Goat Cook-Off is held in Brady, Texas, with the theme "No goats, no glory." Going above and beyond the Goat Action Plan, rangers at Olympic National Park spend three days shooting paintballs at an aggressive, 300-pound goat before finally killing it with a real gun. A few hundred goats in Sri Lanka, destined to ritual decapitation as part of an annual Hindu ceremony, are saved by Buddhist protesters. In the wake of a biology classroom fiasco, in which at least two dozen Chinese students contracted severe brucella melitensis after dissecting goats, two school officials are fired. A truck driven by Lois Faller in Wichita, blows a tire and overturns, spilling 224 goats onto the Kansas Turnpike.
August, 2011: In Terrebonne Parish, Louisiana, after a night of drinking, two teenagers stab two goats to death. A goatnapping is reported in Portland, OR. Another is stymied in Mankato, MN, when two stepsisters, ages 6 and 7 are caught, just before midnight, in pajamas, with a goat they freed from the Sibley Park Zoo. Pat Lee, a resident of Bayou La Batre, Alabama, spots a would-be burglar, with a loaded shotgun, petting a goat in her backyard. Covering the nitty gritty of sports, ESPN reports how Jimmy Baron, while playing for the Turkish Basketball League, was invited by his coach into a circle with his teammates, where, after a goat was beheaded with a machete, the players stuck their fingers in the blood from its neck, and wiped it on their foreheads. Forty goats die in a barn fire in Grand Falls, New Brunswick, Canada. Senator Tom Coburn declares a $300,000 federal research grant to Langston University's American Institute for Goat Research (I'm not making this up) to study the best way to fence goats, wasteful.
July, 2011: Barak killed his goats, so Vincent Jerome Clay shot Barak, the neighbor's Rottweiller. A jury near Pensacola, Florida, finds Clay not guilty. A Landslide in Lakki, Pakistan kills over 700 goats. Officials at Washington's Olympic National Park produce a "mountain goat action plan," urging visitors, among other things, not to pee along Hurricane Ridge and other areas of "high goat use."
June, 2011: Fittingly, it's officially Goat Trauma Awareness Month. Four thousand goats die in China's eastern Jiangsu province after recieving bad goat-pox vaccines. In a high school prank gone wrong -- or right -- a San Diego security guard discovers, in the predawn hours before graduation, a dead goat with its legs, nose, and mouth duct taped shut. Jim Decker, hiking near Washington's Lake Cushman , is stalked and charged by an agressive goat. After a mile, he removes his pack and pulls out a knife, "ready for a showdown," before other hikers scare the goat away. A 30-year old woman in Clover, South Carolina calls 911 on account of a dark goat with six-inch horns that is attacking her home. In Washington and Montana, a rare bacterial infection called Q fever spreads from goats to humans and sickens at least 11 people.
May, 2011: Mark Zuckerberg kills a goat with a knife, posts it on Facebook, and tells Fortune magazine that it was part of a "personal challenge." A 19-year-old West Virginia man, high on bath salts, wearing a bra and panties, is caught with his pants down beside a dead goat, in a pink collar, in a pool of blood. "Normal" Americans begin to crave Moroccan Argan oil, which is derived from the oil from the nut of the Argan tree, eaten and excreted by goats. A New Hampshire resident accuses a goat of setting his barn on fire. Two Nigerian men, accused of stealing a goat, tell a judge that the devil made them do it. Staff at Australia's Yathong Nature Reserve forsake traps, instead shooting goats from the air. In Pakistan, officials discover a freezer full of goat meat at Osama Bin Laden's compound, and (separately) a snow leopard kills 68 goats in one night.
April, 2011: BlueCross BlueShield of North Carolina launches the disconcerting Scapegoat campaign (at ), employing six goats dressed up as an attorney, doctor, insurer, patient, pharmaceutical rep, and hospital administrator, below the phrase "who's responsible for rising medical costs?" Twelve hundred miles away, standing firm against slippery slope arguments, Minneapolis city council members draw the line at chickens, honeybees, ducks, and pigeons, declaring goats unwelcome in the city. Though across the river, St. Paul allows allows horses, pigs, deer, alligators, and goats, Council member Meg Tuhill is unswayed. "I do not want hoofed animals next door to me," she says. "I'm fine with bees, and I'm fine with chickens, but I spent enough time on farms as a kid picking cucumbers for pickle factories, cleaning barns, slopping the pigs, the whole shooting match. I've chosen not to have that lifestyle. And for those of you that are unfamiliar with that lifestyle, when the wind blows the right way, it can be very fragrant [and satanic] in our homes."
March, 2011: Vice presidential candidate Fola Adeola and other ACN-party chieftains make a risky forced landing in Bauchi on account of an invasion of rampaging goats on the Abuja airport runway. Campaign spokesman Ibrahim Modibbo says he suspects political sabotage -- taking Nigerian election fraud to new levels -- and calls for an immediate investigation. On the stairs leading to the Cedar River swim area in Renton, Washington, a dismembered goat head and feet are found on a Friday afternoon. In Limerick, Ireland, a gang of ten kids tortures a goat for hours by, among other methods, hitting it with golf clubs. In South Australia, the Department of Environment is tracking goats and other feral pests via satellite.
February, 2011: Claiming that two of her Hawaiian neighbors killed two of her goats and told her, "That's what happens when you piss people off," Roseanne Barr files a request for a restraining order. Scores of goats south of Sacramento find an opening in a fence and wander onto Interstate 5 during evening rush hour. Traffic backs up for miles, one driver ends up in the hospital, dozens of goats die, and at least one lucky California Highway Patrol officer kills the mortally-wounded goats. Cincinatti Police Department Detective Charles Zopfi examines video of four shoppers buying goat heads at Jungle Jim’s International Market, hoping to identify suspects who, two months ago, left three goat heads on neighborhood porches and nailed a fourth to a homemade cross at Our Lord Christ the King Parish church. Two of the suspects check out fine in interviews, while the other two, Zopfi determines, "were buying other items that made it look like a legitimate purpose,” he says, likely for a party or get-together.
January, 2011: Pleading guilty to an Ukwangali traditional court of having sex with many goats, an illiterate Namibian man identified as Ngongo admits that he marked the hoofs of the animal which best satisfied his needs. Not one to suffer fools gladly, Richard Burley, a 58-year-old county commissioner in Warrenton, Georgia who lost 14 goats to a dog attack, is arrested for allegedly dumping two dead goats in the yard of the dog owner. A swiss chemist who developed "alpine Viagra" from the ground-up horns of mountain goats is selling 50ml spray bottles of the stuff for $50.
December, 2010: A deputy sheriff in Dallas, Texas impounds a supposedly "sweet" pet goat named Minelli, locking her up with other homeless goats, but a county commissioner interferes with justice. The Kenya Police Reserve cracks down, too, after 14 people -- including two police reservists and an assistant chief -- are killed in violent goat raids. Not psyched about Austine Ubaike's habit of slaughtering two goats a week, the city of Meriden, Connecticut bans the practice. (Ubaike plans to appeal -- all the way to federal court -- in the name of cultural and religious freedom.) Paul Malouf, from Rossmore, Australia, is fined $8,000 for neglecting to care for eight goats. Egon Oyarzun, the owner of Goats R Us, faces felony charges in Oakland, California two months after 10 of his goats are found dead. Joe Orlow, in Silver Spring, Maryland, tries, shortly before midnight, to milk an ornery goat that's "screaming his head off," but the cops don't care. Schools in Kathmandu close for the observance of a one-day holiday entailing the sacrifice of more than 2,500 goats. Lacking evidence of satanic symbols, pentagrams, or other clues, Detective Charles Zopfi tries to figure out why someone left two goat heads in a classy Cincinnati neighborhood. "I don't think this is anything where somebody just decided, oh, today I'm gonna get up and place a goat head on somebody's porch," he says. "There's a meaning behind it, but right now, we don't know what it is."
October, 2010: After trying to shoo a mountain goat off of a trail in Washington's Olympic National Park, Robert Boardman, 63, is attacked and killed. The animal stands over Boardman's body, refusing to budge for 15 minutes, while others shout and throw rocks. "The mountain goat was terribly aggressive," a witness says. "It wouldn't move. It stared us down." For a brief moment, the front page of nytimes.com features a photo of half-skinned goat carcass, and an accompanying story, by Michael Pollan, opening thus: "One fire, one goat, many cooks."
August, 2009: A Minnesota woman, caught with a shaved, spraypainted, tied-up goat in the trunk of her car, is charged with animal cruelty.
July, 2010: 59-year-old Walter Kaiser tumbles 50 feet down Austria's Hochkesslekopf Mountain after a mountain goat knocks him off the trail. He is rushed to a hospital, and suffers only minor injuries.
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. 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.”
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.
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.
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.