Our Beheaded Baby Goat Went Viral
by Michael Patrick Welch
A couple of weeks ago, on a moist, chilly morning, I was drinking the day’s first coffee when a text arrived from my wife. “Someone murdered one of the goats.”
We’d recently moved to New Orleans’ slightly more suburban West Bank, where we could have more space, enough for my wife to keep goats. The plan had been to use the goats to help fight the post-Katrina blight that everyone complains about — tangled jungle that takes teams of men, gasoline, and garbage bags to clear away, our goats would devour. The city agreed to pay my wife to keep eighteen goats at a neighborhood park that had fallen into disrepair. For most of the last year, the goats had lived safely in a giant, beautiful, wooded area not far from the Mississippi River.
I sped off to the park, four miles away. As I rolled down the park’s main paved road, then across a verdant baseball field to the goats’ red mobile barn, I passed no one. Locked inside, sixteen goats pressed their noses against windows, watching me step over the waist-high electric fence that encircled their barn and about an acre of unkempt brush; whenever the animals ate one area bare, we’d move the barn and fence to a new feral plot. I walked over to where Calvin lay, on the edge of the stripped bare forest, his head missing. “Jack is missing too,” my wife told me. Calvin and Jack were the sons of our extra-small miniature pygmy goat, Wille. We thought he was too short to mount any of the female goats until one day, Caldonia popped out two tiny miracle babies that, four months later, still resembled kittens.
I trudged into the woods that the goats had cleared, looking for Jack’s body or Calvin’s tiny head. The electric fence, disconnected now, had been humming when my wife arrived earlier — a human intruder would have turned it off before entering. Back where our electric fence ended, the park’s chain-mail fence had been bent upwards, perhaps to accommodate passage. Farther down, an animal had dug under the fence recently. Otherwise, scouring our fenced-in acre, I found nothing.
Back at the barn, the police officer we had called, plus a lady from the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, had arrived and were talking to my wife. She’d let her favorite goat out of the barn; tall, skinny Jesse is so well-mannered and loving that someone must have bottle-fed him from birth and let him sleep in their bed. The cop, who seemed polite and genuinely concerned, brought up “devil worshippers,” which seemed so absurd it forced my mind in the other direction. “Any dog with a particularly strong jaw could have grabbed Calvin’s head in its mouth like a tennis ball,” I said, “then given it a couple casual shakes and popped it off clean.” Everyone else shook their heads in disagreement as they marveled over the clean cut — no tearing, and somehow, no blood.
I didn’t want to mention the teens. But without much else to say, I grudgingly described six preppy white boys and girls who I’d encountered a few days ago. Though I’d rarely seen a goat get shocked, the herd could somehow discern whenever the fence’s battery had died, and escape. That time, they’d stayed just outside the fence, browsing around the baseball field. The teens had gathered to feed leaves to the goats and pet them. One of the boys held tiny Calvin upside down on his back — a position very uncomfortable for goats, whose many stomachs can crush their lungs. I warned the kids about all of this, nicely, and told them they were welcome to feed the goats leaves, but added, “They’re not yours. You shouldn’t really pick up strange animals you know nothing about.” Realizing I sounded like a dick, I added: “You could all help me lead the goats back into their fence? I’d appreciate y’all’s help. It’s easier to get them to follow a big group of people.”
The teens helped happily, except for the boy who’d held Calvin upside down. He stomped off in another direction, shouting back at his friends, “Hey! Fuck that guy! Don’t fucking help that asshole!” In an instant, I was alone with the goats.
By the end of this story, the authorities were convinced of the teens’ guilt.
The SPCA lady must have typed the press release on her iPhone from the park; by the time I arrived back at our house, my inbox had filled with mail from local journalists wanting my response to the SPCA’s “$1,000 reward for information leading to the arrest and conviction of the person responsible for this felony act of animal cruelty.” The press release, which incorrectly listed me as the goats’ owner, read:
The owner of the baby goat believes that an altercation with a group of teenagers this past weekend could be the root of this terrible act. The owner stated that the teenagers were trying to “mess with the goats” behind the fence and he told them to stop… the owner believes one of the teenagers involved in the altercation could be responsible for the goat’s death.
Every local television station took the bait and traveled out to the park with cameras. In a press conference, my sad-looking wife gave them her thoughts upon finding Calvin’s body: “It looked like it was left there on purpose for me to find.” WDSU’s and Fox 8’s stories made more mentions of the teens than of Calvin’s missing brother; WWLTV dreamt up a narrative scenario in which, “a nanny goat ran to the forest area and continuously called for her kid goats”; and WGNO expanded on that: “It’s a heartbreaking moment when you hear the mother goat cry out for her children.” A park visitor told WGNO’s reporter, “There’s a lot of really sick people in the world. It just makes you sad because you kind of have ownership of those goats because you see them every day.” The segment ended with the reporter stating solemnly, “The animals hold a special place in the hearts of families, now a mother’s heart is broken, as she searches for her babies.”
Within hours, the Associated Press picked up the beheading story, which spread across Louisiana to Baton Rouge, and Tibideaux, whose Daily Comet reported, incorrectly, that Calvin had been one of four goats, and that my name was Michael King. After that, the TV station KSLA ran the story in Shreveport, Louisiana, as well as Texas, Oklahoma and Arkansas. Within twelve hours, it spread to papers and stations in Virginia, New Jersey, North Carolina, Arizona, and more. Texts streamed in from friends all over the country as if one of our daughters had died: “I can’t imagine how you all feel”; “We are here if you need anything,”; “Thinking of you during this tragic time.”
By evening, our non-story had gone national: ABC and Huffington Post ran a video of our herd and discussed the beheading, but didn’t mention the teens. Fox News reported, “SPCA spokeswoman Alicia Haefele (HAY-fuh-lee) says King’s husband, Michael King, told investigators the culprits might be teenagers he argued with over the weekend because they were trying to ‘mess with the goats.’”
On Sunday, the media storm ended when Calvin’s official obituary ran in New Orleans’s paper of record, The Times-Picayune, and the New Orleans Advocate printed a 1A above-the-fold story that my wife felt was the least sensational and most balanced of them all. “I’m not surprised that something happened to them, but I’m surprised that this is what happened,” my wife had admitted to the reporter. “I had been nervous about leaving them over here because somebody might just think they’re so cute and want to take them. But that’s not what happened.”
The next morning, I woke to a follow-up message from the cop. He said me that he was still waiting on the autopsy, but “in the meantime, I’d like to get a better description of these teens you had an altercation with.” I tried to change the subject: “Why do you think this story has gotten so much traction?” I asked him. He hadn’t read the Daily Mail story, but said that, since a vacationing Irish cop was shot while removing two hundred dollars from an ATM at 5 a.m. outside the French Quarter, many UK publications had begun following the NOPD on Twitter, looking for more strange New Orleans stories. “Like y’all’s,” he said. We discussed the possibility that the word “beheaded” transformed our story into fodder for algorithms in the age of ISIS. But the officer kept pushing me back to the teens until I told finally him that the mean boy had “Beiber hair.” But, I had to add, “I hope you aren’t putting all your eggs in this one basket.”
“I think it’s better, for y’all’s sake,” he said, “that we take this case up, and try to solve it, rather than just saying ‘Oh it was an animal,’ and dropping it. Don’t you think?”
The media had moved on from us by the time the autopsy finally came back. A knife had been used to behead Calvin. On February 4th, The New Orleans Advocate reported that the SPCA raised its reward to three thousand dollars.
Last week, we chose a new green area farther back into the park, a smaller plot, to maximize the fence’s shock, and added another, seven-foot-high fence made of barely visible deer mesh. The animals definitely won’t escape, though we can never totally keep people out. The goats had been smart enough to put themselves away each night in the barn, but I can sense them wondering why we now come at sunset, trick them into the barn with food, then lock the door behind them.