You know, almost all goats – both billies and nannys – are born with horns. Some of our human rulers remove our beautiful crowns by burning them off with a hot iron. It’s called disbudding, and we undergo this torture within our first 10 days of life. It’s akin to infant human boys undergoing castration! It hurts like hell, but we have no choice in the matter. Some of us die during the disbudding process and others are left with brain damage. Lucky, some goats with kind owners are sparred this harrowing ordeal.

But even without our horns, we have a natural tendency to scuffle with our brothers over turf and hay and treats. So, now hornless, we butt heads. It’s what we do. Sometimes we’re just playing around.

But it’s always a problem when we venture out in tribes (that’s what our groups are called) and cause too much mayhem. Sometimes we’re protesting to defend our comrades who are hauled off to slaughter houses. Many social-activist goats are just plain PISSED at humans who mistreat us, abandon us along the road, fail to trim our hooves, and condemn us for honoring our god, Pan. So, both horned and hornless goats get all wound up and start to rumble. Since butting a human would mean instant death by gun-happy hordes, we take out our aggression on each other. Heads start to bleed and bruise from punctures and excessive butting. It gives billies a bad name.

But all too often the media doesn’t focus on the REAL issue of goat abuse at the hands of human goat-a-phobes. Do the news crews bother to videotape scenes of goats being hauled away in trucks and slaughtered? NO! Such is life.

All I can tell my fellow billies is this: engage in PEACEFUL protests! You can gather together and roam the streets. Voice your concerns in dignified baaahs. Study up on civil disobedience. Follow the words of Thoreau, Martin Luther King and Gandhi. And, to paraphrase Good Human Johnny Cash: Don’t take your horns to town. Literally and figuratively.

Oh, and every now and then it’s totally okay to POOP on the road, but do it discretely.

— Molino, Sept 9, 2020