A Goat On The Loose

Inver Grove Heights, Minnesota, a suburb of St. Paul further down the Mississippi, has a big problem. Well, maybe not that big. It's the size of a goat. The goat has been wandering around town, peering in patio windows and evidently making a nuisance of itself, as this article explains. There is an APB out to the forty member police force to capture this animal before . . . .something or other. The police chief fears that the goat will wander onto one of the highways in the neighborhood and get struck by a car.

Sure, that could certainly happen, In fact, it happens fairly frequently. Not with goats but instead with white-tail deer, famous for dashing in front of speeding automobiles and often being plastered across the grille to fatal effect. The car is usually messed up as well.

Hunting deer, one of the more popular fall pastimes in Minnesota, results in the neutralization of thousands of deer that could damage new Teslas or the popular diesel 4x4 crew-cab pickups that lumber down the streets. It is, however, verboten to kill these deer in the populated areas where they're most likely to encounter a speeding car. In the rare cases where deer death is deemed the solution to a problem, they're exterminated by "professional" hunters. In this case, the pros are to be law enforcement officers, unless they can figure out some way to capture the goat and remove it to some enclosed environment.

No one worries much about other animal traffic fatalities, squirrels, rabbits, geese, ducks, possum, turkeys, raccoons, turtles and snakes, etc. Domestic dogs and cats, now treated more like children than pets, get smashed flat from time to time also. They're just the price we pay to get to work in the morning or buzz down to the C-store for a pack of smokes. And they normally don't do much damage to the Prius.


Update: The goat has been apprehended. Inver Grove Heights police have announced that with the assistance of a local resident the goat has been captured and transported to the University of Minnesota campus in St. Paul.