photo by nbraier (flickr)
Soldado’s post reminded me of a story. One of my uncles used to raise parakeets, along with pigeons, rabbits, guinea pigs, etc. He raised them for shows. He was really good at this, and had a whole hallway full of trophies. The animals that weren’t pretty enough for shows wound up being birthday presents for us. As a result, when I was a kid, I had a lot of funny-looking, kind of ill-tempered small animals as pets. But I loved them! So my parents, like Soldado’s, thought “Nina loves animals, let’s take her to a petting zoo”.
My understanding of most petting zoos now is that the animals are in pens, and you can maybe reach through the pens and pet the animals, but you are not actually in the pens with the animals. Well I don’t know where my parents took me or if maybe petting zoo protocol had not yet been established in the 80s, but at this place you were IN with the animals.
So I’m standing around a bunch of animals and I am wearing my favorite t-shirt, which happens to be a purple t-shirt with a picture of Figment, the Disney cartoon dragon. Also this was after dinner and little Nina hadn’t quite mastered the art of using a fork yet so there is spaghetti sauce on my shirt, which I am already a bit distressed about because this is my Figment shirt and I love it.
Apparently spaghetti sauce is like heroin for goats because before I know it a goat is standing in front of me trying to pull of my shirt. It’s bad enough having a big ugly goat trying to pull your shirt off, but to have it be your Figment shirt is really too much. The trip ended with me crying and having to be rescued from the goat and I don’t know what happened to my shirt, I blacked out the memory because it is too traumatic.
Superbuff Moral Always wear clean whites, you never know when there will be goats at your capoeira school. And if you are a messy eater don’t go to petting zoos, or anywhere in public with me.
Superbuff Lose Your Shirt Workout 5 sets bench press, 5 sets close-grip chest press, 5 sets batmans, 100 tricep dips, 100 pushups alternating wide, normal, and narrow hand positions
The sight of that demonic looking goat just made my whites very dirty-
Um… I don’t know if the goats will be as interested in that, but you never know
Goats will eat almost anything. They would have eaten your shirt even without the spaghetti sauce. I’ve heard about sites where goats kept eating the string that delineated the excavators’ squares. They ate all of the upholstery out of one of the cars in my sister’s town there. They make pigs look picky.
Uh, hmm. Solution to growing landfills = goats?