Goat Knowing
No one asked the question that needed to be asked.
I suspect they thought it would sound too aggressive, or make it sound too political, or detract from the specific issue. So reasonable. So patient with the powers that be and the insistence on reasonable petition.
That sort of mewling behavior is the most ungoatlike I’ve ever seen. I went expecting passionate, granola, dark hippies: the kind who home school their kids, grow their own kale but secretly hate it, and are staunchly anti-vax based on three YouTube videos and a misquote from someone’s granddaddy; but what I ended up finding were sort of mainline libertarians and a few religious democrats.
Goats. I mean goats. not GOAT, which is an acronym, but we’re not talking about Ali here either, and unless you’re talking about Muhammad Ali, there is no one else in the history of sport or culture that has earned the title Greatest of All Time. Yes, we’re in Louisville and yes this Ali’s hometown. But the town hall meeting in the Southwest Branch of the library was about goats.
Now I know a little about goats. It was the pandemic year and Amanda wanted to borrow these four goats for a few weeks from a local woman who was 46 weeks pregnant and her goats had eaten her property down to dirt. She used the wool to create her own thread to sew some really very lovely textiles. She showed up with the goats in the back seat of a grocery getter, a mini van like the one my friend George couldn’t get stolen from the heart of Hell’s Kitchen (before Hell’s Kitchen got all gentrified, back when it had grit and teeth and even the NYPD was scared to go in after dark). Goats will eat pretty much anything, including poison ivy, which is great. But the only other thing they do with rapid frequency besides eat is shit, little tiny bullets seeds of everything they eat, so they spread poison ivy at approximately the same rate that they eat it unless you keep up with the shit shoveling. We managed to keep them for about a week and a half before they had to go home. The four goats — Boone, Betty, Merlin, and Wally — used to live on the back porch and would stare at us through the windows, like they were watching TV. Chew, watch, and shit: like someone watching America’s Got Talent. They got out once when our housemate was taking out the garbage and didn’t close the gate completely. They stood at the end of the driveway like they were waiting on an Uber until my wife shook a coffee can of goat treats and they hustled straight back in.
So the town hall meeting went the way you’d expect. The metro council member, Jennifer Chappell (D-15) made it clear she did not write the updated ordinance that would make it impossible for anyone to keep goats because the new ordinance increased the minimum lot size. Clearly, it was written by someone whose experience with livestock was limited to a petting zoo, and Ms. Chappell struck the perfect tone of being slightly out of her depth but focused and interested in learning more. It’s only fair; either you know goats or you don’t know goats. The learning curve isn’t too steep, but you can definitely tell you’re on a rocky incline. The Best speakers were a man from an animal rescue, which is God’s Good Work as far as I’m concerned, and a woman who grew up on a farm in Western Kentucky who knew exactly the acreage required to be considered an urban farm by the USDA. There was one speaker who spoke quite articulately about his wife’s spiritual experience with sheep, which brought to mind the only quote I know from Thunder and The Moon, a maybe not real book once referenced in the British sitcom As Time Goes By:
“I am alone with my sheep. But my sheep are not alone with me.”1
But once the guy showed up talking about emotional support cockatiels and tanks of fish, Amanda and I left to go eat dinner at the Applebee’s on Preston Highway (we had a gift card), where the waiter tried to sell us Spectrum internet before taking our order. Gotta hustle, I suppose. I almost wanted to stay, but I got the feeling no one would ask the question that needed asking, nor would they ask the necessary follow up question:
“Who wrote the ordinance amendment? And who’s goat shit in their corn flakes?”
- As Time Goes By. Series 5, Episode 5. 1996. ↩︎