Kevin P. Casey
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For years, Jim had been bugging his wife, Amy, for goats. Not because he'd grown up on a farm or had developed a sudden craving for goat milk. It was more of a guy thing—a simpatico connection with the goats' head-butting boisterousness.
"If they see something new, they're like, 'What's that? I'm going to smash it and play with it and jump on it and stomp on it,'" says Jim, a 34-year-old firefighter. "I like the attitude."
So it was that two years ago, on his birthday, Jim and Amy found themselves at a Mount Vernon farm to pick up a pair of Nigerian dwarf goats. (Amy had planned on a single purchase, but the breeder convinced her to get two, saying the animals become morose outside the herd.) These goats had the stiff hair and horizontal pupils of normal goats, but they'd been whittled down to the size of Pomeranians. The shrunken creatures looked at Jim and Amy and said, "Maah."
After weaning, the goats moved into the backyard of the couple's Georgetown home. And though small, their appetite for destruction was everything Jim had hoped for. He watched them suck the yard into their four stomachs until there was nothing left but rockery, ground, and a carpet of turds. Sometimes the goats, known as Pixie and Trixie, joined him in the house, where they displayed for company their unique table manners.
"We'd get drunk at a party every once in a while and bring them in," says Jim (who did not want his last name used, for reasons that will presently become clear, if they aren't already). "The first thing you know, they're on the kitchen table eating the curtains."
Jim took Pixie and Trixie hiking on Mount Si and for on-leash walks around the neighborhood, where he sometimes ran up against the goat haters. "They don't harass," Jim says, but "they seem genuinely upset and bothered, like this is something amiss."
Other passers-by just gawked and paparazzied the trio with camera phones.
Similar to that guy in your neighborhood who carries a ferret, or the one who's got a python around his neck, Jim became a minor celebrity by virtue of his unusual sidekicks. People might not know his name, but they knew the names of his goats.
So it came as a surprise last month when Jim discovered that his caprine companions might not be fully kosher. At a feed store in Burien, Jim noticed a petition asking for signatures to legalize little goats, posted by the "Goat Justice League."
Intrigued, he gave the petition poster a call. The woman said she, too, had been keeping miniature goats, but recently ran afoul of the city's Department of Planning and Development, which said it considered her goats to be illegal farm animals. Worse, a child in her neighborhood had fallen seriously ill, and health inspectors were investigating the goats as a possible source of a bacterial outbreak.
These days, Jim is trying to keep his head down and avoid trouble. His goats are hanging out in a base camp he built, halfway up a tree. "I'm a little scared," he says. "Maah," say Pixie and Trixie.
As far back as 10,000 years ago, goats were giving up milk, meat, and skins to their two-legged overlords. Yet despite being perhaps the oldest domesticated animal, goats have an oddly bad rap. Male goats, or bucks, are responsible for much of the negative perception. They smell like rancid cheese and fight so furiously that their lifespan is much shorter than the does'. They also intentionally pee on their own faces, a move designed to attract the ladies, who, perhaps because they've given up on reforming bucks, have come to view it as sexy.
People typically associate goats with randiness or an inclination to chew on stupid stuff like beer cans, as if goats were the frat boys of the animal kingdom. On the occasion that goats are given the chance to prove themselves worthy of greater callings, it's often in an experimental setting. An "ark" of them was burned up by the U.S. in its Bikini Atoll atomic tests, according to PETA. The organization also charges that the military still uses goats for surgery training in "wound labs," shooting them in the legs to simulate battle injuries.
In The Men Who Stare at Goats, a 2005 account of the military's now-defunct but eternally hilarious First Earth Battalion, British journalist Jon Ronson describes one extraordinary wound lab in Fort Bragg, N.C. Inside lived 100 goats, whom, Ronson says, paranormal-obsessed Special Forces personnel attempted to kill via telepathy. (Allegedly, one thought-warrior succeeded in stopping the heart of a goat.) The soldiers also unleashed upon a goat the technique of dim mak, aka the "death touch." "Goat Lab used to be called Dog Lab, but it turned out that nobody wanted to do all that to dogs, so they switched to goats," Ronson writes. "It was apparently determined within Special Forces that it was just about impossible to form an emotional bond with a goat."
Yet there evidently is such a bond. One of the area's premier ruminant enthusiasts is Jennie Grant. In a former life, Grant was the Seattle School District's first recycling coordinator and founder of the Seattle Pug Gala (a fund-raiser for pug rescue). Now she works at her Madrona home, where she writes ad copy for a real-estate agent and manages a stamp-sized farm of chickens and two miniature La Mancha goats, Brownie and Snowflake. Grant is also the originator of the Goat Justice League, a now 100-member strong organization.
