View from the North 40: Another edition of barnyards gone wild

The internet is full of farm animals that have gone wild in the past two weeks, and I’m not talking about Youtube videos of farm cats being all crazy cute and stuff. I am talking about the livestock participating in shenanigans that could get someone’s eye poked out.

In no particular order, we have: 14 goats and sheep, all employees of a Virginia landscaping business who walked off the job sometime late Monday night or early Tuesday morning. The four-legged work crew was supposed to be clearing brush and other unwanted vegetation from a property in Richmond, Virginia, for their employer RVA Goats, United Press International reported, but the fence was damaged and the critters left that property; they then commenced hobby farming on someone’s yard two blocks away.

Certainly, I don’t know all the circumstances of this particular situation, but from my experience with goats and sheep, they only eat the coarse, unsavory shrubbery and the weeds after all the plants you wanted to keep are gone — and after all obvious and previously unimagined means of escape from their enclosure are exhausted.

Fortunately for these critters they ended up in Linda Hochstein’s yard, and she thought this was the best thing to happen to her in a long time because she loves animals and doesn’t know goats. Hochstein spent the next three hours outside keeping the animals herded into her yard, where the goats and sheep lounged on her manicured lawn and dined al fresca on her landscaping. No word on whether she regretted her decision by the end of the three hours, but the article did say that she eventually needed the assistance of her neighbors and a news crew on site.

Since I started with small ruminants, I’ll go ahead and finish them up with a story about a smooth-haired, non-wool-bearing Cameroon sheep being filmed by a BBC television crew on an estate/safari park in the southwest region of England. One young ram was caught on camera approaching a second cameraman who was kneeling in the grass, and the ram, well, rammed the cameraman in the, uh, British crown jewels.

Don’t worry, the cameraman survived and, I suspect, made a full recovery.

I really have no point to this story other than to say that if you want to know how many times I’ll laugh at the same video clip of a man getting “tapped out of the game” by a ram to the groin, it seems to be the same number of times I’ll laugh at clips of virtually the same thing happening to dads playing ball with their little kids — which is to say an infinite number of times. Every. Time.

To be fair, though, I would bet money that the news clip is still playing on a continuous loop back at the TV station, and all of the guy’s colleagues are still laughing, too.

In other news, The Mercury News in San Jose, California, reported Aug. 28 that a small herd of cattle have been invading an upscale neighborhood in that city every night since sometime in July. The cattle shade up somewhere during the day, but no one knows who the herd belongs to.

I can’t help with identifying the owners, but I feel it’s safe to say that the breed is the elusive Teenager Cows. They sleep all day, stay up all night trashing the place, eat everything and leave their crap laying around everywhere for someone else to clean up.

That cattle situation sounds bad, but I’m sure the residents of Orange, Vermont, would take a small herd of rampaging cattle over what they have had for the past month: 250 pigs rooting up their town.

The Associated Press reported Aug. 31, that 50 adult pigs and 200 piglets escaped from a pig farm and were roaming the countryside and the town of Orange. If the cattle in San Jose are like teenagers, then these pigs are like gangs with organized crime lords at their helm calling for all-out warfare against cars, people and the landscape.

As of the Wednesday, the pigs’ owner and state livestock agencies had rounded up 95 percent of the thugs, but most of the rest still remain free and neither the residents nor the owner are happy with the situation.

The residents have been dealing with the hazard and the mess the pigs leave behind since mid-August. And the owner, who claims his fences were sabotaged, is getting a hefty fine for his pigs’ offenses. I’m assuming they are charged for trespassing, loitering, vandalism, health nuisance and willful destruction of property, along with traffic hazard violations.

As of Aug. 31, those fines totaled $81,955. Yes, that’s right, almost $82,000.

So it appears that everyone likes the humanity of free-range livestock, but not the reality of it when it’s in their backyard. In the pigs’ case, I’m also sure no one will want to the pay the extra $330 per pig at butchering time to cover the range fee.

But, man, I bet those pigs had fun while it lasted.

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The philosophy of the day is: Live like someone kicked your fence open at [email protected].