Grant dived into animal husbandry last October after reading about the dire state of industrial food production in Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma. She originally bought her animals, from a Lynnwood farm, for their milk. Grant says she hoped to whip up a soufflé from home-produced ingredients. (Flour production is proving to be a roadblock.)
But Brownie and Snowflake came to mean much more to her than smoothies, chevre, and pancake batter. They wowed the neighbors by eating up briar patches, and earlier this year, Snowflake taught Grant's 7-year-old son about sex. Mom escorted the lad to a nearby farm, where she paid a breeder $50 to have her doe mate with a stud buck named Jumping Jack Flash. (In general, does only produce milk once they've been knocked up.)
Kevin P. Casey
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Trouble reared its head in May, however, when a girl who lived a few blocks away began showing symptoms consistent with Q fever, a serious, sometimes fatal disease that's transmitted through livestock. "In doing our disease investigation and trying to go through all the things that it could be, we determined there was a goat in the community," says James Apa, spokesperson for Public Health–Seattle & King County. The fever-causing bacteria could have drifted in the air from Grant's goat pen to the girl's house, says Apa. But when the goats and the girl were tested, the results came back negative.
By then, however, Grant's goats had been outed and, in the case of a couple of neighbors, vilified. Seattleites are allowed to harbor farm animals only on property that's more than 20,000 square feet (a little bigger than an official hockey rink). Grant's plot is less than a quarter that size. City officials told her to lose the goats. Grant counterattacked with a letter to the inspector on her case, stating that not all goats can be judged with the same broad brush. "[M]y mini-manchas are not farm animals," she said, "but rather, small animals."
She protested to the city that the lineage of her pets lifted them out of the barnyard crowd of bulls, sheep, and horses—which the law prohibits on properties her size—and into the legally protected camp of "small animals," such as cats, dogs, and potbellied pigs. Like many goat owners, she likens her little friends to "pets with benefits," a category widely accepted in less industrialized countries.
"Things have evolved to the point where we have pets who we treat as kings and who serve no purpose, and we have farm animals who for the most part are bred under inhumane circumstances for a single purpose, to provide cost-effective food. We have become extreme in our view of animals," Grant wrote in a letter to the city. "Why can't an animal that serves some purpose, such as a small dairy goat, be permitted?...This is the way things are in other cultures and it is the way things were in the James Herriot stories."
In rejecting Grant's plea for tolerance, William Mills, a senior land-use planner in the city's Department of Planning and Development, relied on a different literary inspiration: the dictionary. His Aug. 3 letter observed that while Seattle law doesn't specifically define "farm animal," the law does list as examples of such "cows, horses, sheep and other similar animals" (emphasis Mr. Mills'). He added: "Webster's New Collegiate Dictionary defines a 'goat' in part as a 'horned ruminant mammal related to the sheep'" (emphasis ours).
But Grant got a rather more sympathetic response when she e-mailed the office of City Council member Richard Conlin. Her missive was evidently intercepted by the biggest animal softie working in local government, because a "legislative aide called right back and said, 'We're so sorry you had to deal with this,'" Grant says. Staffers in Conlin's office quickly drafted an ordinance that could allow regular homeowners the opportunity to board up to three "Pygmy, Dwarf and Miniature Goats," as long as they're dehorned, neutered, and licensed.
Conlin's legislation, which receives a public hearing Sept. 18, will one day enter the National Agricultural Hall of Fame as the sweetest love letter ever penned by bureaucrat to goat. The ordinance asserts that "more people worldwide drink goat milk than any other animal's," lauds little goats' "good-natured personalities, friendliness, faithfulness, and hardy constitution," and goes for the gold by citing the "numerous benefits for urban sustainability that goats provide, including that their manure is an excellent source of garden compost, their hair is a renewable source of fiber, and goats can provide an alternative to lawn mowers." (In fact, goats do not like to eat grass, though they will devour vines and brush. The UW recently used some to clear out an overgrown area near Husky Stadium.)
Conlin estimates the revised law will bring "possibly hundreds" of little-goat owners out of the shadows. "People are keeping them undercover because they're not legal at this point," he says in an interview.
Ingela Wanerstrand, a 42-year-old volunteer at Sustainable Ballard and a friend of Grant's, says she would love to have a goat on hand, since she's allergic to cow milk. "I don't know if you know what it's like not to have a glass of milk for years, then to have a cold glass of milk," she says. Wanerstrand doesn't care for store-bought goat milk because it can taste like licking the animal itself. "The stuff I tried at Jennie's was really good. It didn't taste the least bit goaty."
