Life in most parts of Indonesia is life with the menagerie. Chickens, cats, water buffaloes, cows, dogs, horses always seem to be around, mostly looking to cross the road. However, there is no animal more of a complete and utter menace to society, no beast on either two legs or four that lacks such a fundamental respect for fellow creation as the goat.
Where to begin? Well, the devoted of you may recall my prior complaints dealing with the goat penchant for inopportune road crossings. Heck, even Slate has run a piece on goats, where the writer and the proprietor of the suspiciously photogenic and Labrador populated ‘Bedlam Farms’ (est. 2003) complains that his goats will not stop jeering him. (Perhaps they know that they are being exploited.) Uncouth or not, surely this is enough exposure for goats?
I say no, readers, and let me tell you why.
More than anything, the entire goat program is based on a simple and utter refusal to acknowledge the limits of good taste. For your average goat, the quest for chaos and disquiet is never completed. Whether it is ‘accidentally’ wandering into the path of an approaching motorist, breaking into even the most secure location, or generally ballyhooing late into the night, a goat is never satisfied. After all, can you ever really trust something with a digestive tract so tenacious that can handle tin, drywall, and parsnips?
This is frighteningly apparent the first time you truly gaze into the subtly askance, completely off-center gaze of a goat, eyes that intone, with fiendish repetition and indefatigable vigor, but one thing: “I am a goat. I am a goat. I am a goat.”
What is more, the goat mind is truly the mind of a mad, mad genius. Confronted by a fenced vegetable patch, the goat not only employs his omnipotent doggedness to break in, but also his calculating shrewdness, leaning and casually butting (miming what the uninitiated interpret as innocent scratching) against the fence. Hours later when the fence crumples, the goat, having prepared long before, just happens to tumble ‘accidentally’ into the veggie patch in question. Throwing the sauciest of ‘if these veggies were not for me, you would have built a better fence’ looks over his shoulder, the goat then proceeds to devour the garden, pausing only to catcall and abuse (with his mouth full) anyone within earshot.
Of course, the goat life is not always vegetable gardens and traffic snarls, and most of the goat schedule is devoted to trotting, trash foraging, and throwing loud mouthed and embittered insults at the good, god-fearing people of their communities. They must be stopped. I have taken to running them down with my bicycle. What will you commit to do today?
1 comment:
Surely there is another side to goats if you open your heart. What about the seductive glances of the regal Nubian goat? Or the joyful advances of the Pygmy goats at the Jardin D'Acclimatition in Paris? No tin can diet for them.
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