DurianJoe is, as he says, entirely accurate when he refers to it as an “early and brutal death”. I saw that comment as pointed – necessarily so – but not snarky. I responded to it because I do think it needs to be discussed in these sorts of pastoral rhapsody articles. It’s all well and good to wax poetic about the joys of raising goats but it’s not an unalloyed joy and there are some very brutal facts to contend with.

To wit:

If you have dairy goats, you must breed them to get milk. In spring, each doe will give you one to four kids. You will likely have more kids than you can sell. Male kids are pretty much valueless; you’re lucky to give them away. You can either slaughter the surplus or you can have an ever growing herd that will quickly bankrupt you feeding them.

I had to slaughter one kid this spring because she had a congenital neurological disorder and never learned to walk. She was a runt and if we’d known she wouldn’t get any better we’d have slaughtered her at birth.

The second kid to be slaughtered couldn’t learn to nurse properly. Wouldn’t suckle and took ten minutes of fighting just to get him to choke down some milk.

All kids must be dehorned, which means taking a heated iron and burning the horn buds when they’re three to four days old. It’s not a fun experience for anyone and the kids scream like banshees. But only a fool would have goats with horns, and many a fool has been taken to the ER. Or had their goats gored and/or killed, maimed, blinded.

As for means of slaughter, I can’t imagine using a knife, but I know it’s required for halal and kosher. That’s strictly for ‘cleanliness’ according to religious belief, and has nothing to do with efficacy or humaneness. A bullet at the base of the skull is instantaneous and as close to painless as it gets. If you can’t bring yourself to do this you can send the goat to a butcher or slaughterhouse. But that means scaring hell out of the goat continuously for the last few hours of its life. For me, the choice is clear: I have to take the responsibility to do it right and as fast as possible.

So yeah, goats are everything Mr. Kessler says, and more. And the ‘more’ that I’ve detailed is brutal and there’s no point in euphemizing it or candy-coating it. Brutal, and bloody sometimes.

This can mean nothing but good. Finally, the time is right for la Abdul to reunite with MC Skat Kat for that long-awaited sequel to Opposites Attract. Although the two originally fell out over the usual “creative differences,” they feel that "the magic is back" and it is time to “bring the noise” and reassert their primacy in the pop charts. It’ll be “fresh”. And “edgy”.

I’m already excited, in ways that could get me arrested.

Well played, sir!

A good companion to this essay is "The Toys of Peace," by the english satirist Saki (HH Munro). The idea of 'engineering' the bloodlust out of young boys was in vogue at the time he penned it, shortly before WW1, and Saki drew much the same conclusion.

Alas, Saki died in the trenches and the story was released in a posthumous collection of the same name. Irony? More like inevitability, perhaps.

http://www.eastoftheweb.com/short-stories/UBooks/ToysPeac.shtml

In the early nineties, a friend of mine was given a free ticket to see Neil Diamond perform in concert. She said that the most hilarious – and sad – part of the experience was Neil’s between-song chatter to the audience, as he repeatedly reminisced, “When I was in The Jazz Singer...” and “At about the time I was filming The Jazz Singer, I...”

And every time La Pag invokes her glory days of Sexual Personae et al, as her ego is contractually obligated to do in each and every column, all I hear is “When I was in The Jazz Singer...”

Of course, that does not mean that I think Cammy is as talented as Neil Diamond. That would be absurd.

I think the reason these images inspire such revulsion is because it's another 'uncanny valley' experience for us. These children appear to be neither flesh nor fowl; because the visuals are confused, we can't form a coherent interpretation as to whether they're child, adult, doll, little person, progeria sufferer, extraterrestrial or audioanimatronic.

On the plus side, one of them will be nominated for president some day, dontchaknow .

"What's wrong with a kiss, boy? Hmm? Why not start her off with a nice kiss? You don't have to go leaping straight for the clitoris like a bull at a gate. Give her a kiss, boy."

- Humphrey, Monty Python's The Meaning of Life