City Goats is primarily a how-to book on keeping goats in cities, but its also got some literary analysis involving the Great Gatsby and goat legalization. Since the movie is out and doing well at the box office, I’m including an excerpt here.

A FEW yEARS BACK, I HEADED OUT OF TOWN with my son and pug dog to the annual Pug Gala held at the Evergreen State Fairgrounds in Monroe. As the event drew to a close and the pugs began to droop and head out to their cars to nap on their rides home, Spencer and I stood in the parking lot and noticed an odd assortment of antique washing machines and tractors and a building with a sign out front that said, “museum.” We stepped inside, and being the only ones around, got a private tour. There was an old cream separator, a wood powered kitchen stove, a rope making machine, and a pre-electrical refrigeration machine that used creek water flowing through copper pipes to cool milk down to 40 degrees F in a matter of minutes. When the curator learned that I was interested specifically in the history of farm animals
in cities, he went into a back room and returned with an old, stylish lavender hatbox. When he worked the lid of the hatbox up and off, I saw within a tattered and yellowed manuscript. What I learned from reading through it that afternoon intrigued me.

Although many people are unaware of this, F. Scott Fitzgerald was one of America’s earliest proponents of goat legalization. In the 1920s, a dark period in American his- tory for farm animals, Fitzgerald watched in pained dismay as city codes in urban areas across the United States were revised to oust cows, horses, ducks, chickens, and goats from the city limits.

As a lover of cows and especially goats, F. Scott took this ousting hard. In fact, he took it so hard that he began to drink heavily. He also began to feel a need to write about it and soon was driven to write what many consider his best work, the American classic The Great Gatsby. In his original manuscript, a bootlegger and goat enthusiast named Jay
Gatz keeps several goats, and his favorite is named Myrtle. Jay gives Myrtle to Daisy, a married woman he’d met in his youth and admired ever since. Daisy can’t get over what a great goat Myrtle is. Tom, Daisy’s husband, gets upset because he thinks Jay’s gift of Myrtle is part of a scheme to seduce Daisy and steal her away. In this, Tom is right.

While Tom is seething about what he feels is the inappropriate gift of a goat, he is also mad at goats in general because he is a real estate developer and goats are getting in the way of his business dealings. On the day his wife Daisy receives the goat Myrtle, a goat farmer in Long Island refuses Tom’s offer to buy his land, which for years has housed his herd of prize-winning Swiss Alpine goats. This refusal to sell messes up one of Tom’s biggest, albeit also very shady, real estate schemes. One afternoon, just after meeting with the goat farmer who is still stubbornly refusing to sell him the goat farmland, Tom comes home to find Myrtle the goat eating daisies on his front lawn. He’s a man with anger problems and has built up a lot of goat-directed rage. In addi- tion, he is lacking in moral fiber, so when he sees the goat eating his daisies, he runs her down with his car and then backs over her. Not satisfied with murdering a single goat, he drives off and runs over the goat farmer who won’t sell the land, as well as Jay, the goat-loving bootlegger, and his tennis partner, Allen. Allen has nothing to do with goats but was in the wrong place at the wrong time. Tom then tells Daisy that they had better skip town and head to their home in the Bahamas.

Daisy is happy to skip town. She is feeling guilty because it turns out that she hasn’t been washing Myrtle’s udder properly and, as a result, Myrtle has contracted mastitis. This helps explains why Myrtle didn’t get out of Tom’s way when she saw him gunning for her with the car. She had not been feeling her best and wasn’t as alert as usual. In the end, Tom and Daisy drive off and Jay Gatz is left with two broken legs and the sense that Daisy is an irresponsible goat owner and a poor choice for a girlfriend. In this original version of the book, Jay Gatz moves to Montana to heal and be with goats in a rural area where goat-hating real estate agents are scarce.

You may find this hard to believe and ask, “How did the plot get changed around so much?” What happened is that Maxwell Perkins, a closet goat hater and Fitzgerald’s editor, knew about F. Scott’s drinking problem and revised the manuscript according to the whims of his third wife, also a goat hater. When asked to approve the final ver- sion of the story, F. Scott was three sheets to the wind and signed off on the changes. Had he not done so, The Great Gatsby would stand today, not just as a great novel but also as one that changed history. As Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle is remembered for instigating the enactment of today’s food safety regulations, and as Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin is remembered for fueling the Civil War, The Great Gatsby would be remembered as helping to end the banning of farm animals from cities.

Although Perkins significantly altered the plot line of The Great Gatsby, much of the language of the novel survived intact. Such is the case with the last line of the novel, which, according to the original manuscript read, “And so we beat on, goats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”

What exactly is Fitzgerald saying here? This is a question that scholars have debated for many years. I think it’s clear that in this great last line, he is lamenting the loss of goats from our day-to-day lives. He points to how, in our modern goat-hating era, we are beaten down by our culture of consumption. Jay, having had his favorite goat run down, must retreat to earlier times, times he finds in the quiet fields of the Montana landscape.

Fitzgerald’s last sentence rings as true today as it did when he first penned it. While legalizing goats may be hard work, we must beat on against the current of the antigoat coalition to bring goats back into our modern world. Goats, with their strange rectan- gular eyes and stubborn, curious personalities, can help us combat the emptiness of our material age.

Great literature often offers great lessons. Such is the case with the long-lost Great Gatsby manuscript. Through allegory, it points out that while keeping goats in urban or, in the case of Long Island, suburban settings, is a lot of work, it is also what can help bring meaning to our lives through love, good food, adventure, and friendship.

I got there 10 minutes early, found a parking space (not easy in Pioneer Square), and then realized, I’d forgotten my wallet. Seattle’s parking enforcement misses NOTHING, so I was in deep doo doo. I ran to Olson Kundig, borrowed $2.00 in quarters from my friend who works there, and ran back to my car. On my way, a homeless man approached me and asked if I could spare a quarter. I told him, as a matter of fact, I couldn’t since I’d just had to borrow some to pay for parking. He said, “Oh, here’s a quarter for you.”

Maybe I need to spiff up my wardrobe

Peter and Marty Feldman are very cute together. Here’s a movie I made starring the two of them. Note, for whatever reason, you have to click on this post and then the link to the movie shows up.

I’ve found a good home for Peter. I put an ad on Craigslist and heard nothing and became discouraged. But then, for whatever reason, I looked at my junk folder which I’d forgotten about, and there was an inquiry about my ad. I e-mailed right back and wasn’t too late. I sent photos and more information and the person said she wanted him! The adopter has a single female goat and a pony and wanted a companion wether. She’s also got three acres. He’ll have fun with that.

He leaves in just a week. He’ll be just five weeks old, but since he’s a bottle baby, the new owner can give him a bottle with milk from a neighbor goat. This will let help him bond with his new home and means I’ll start getting ALL the milk in just a week. Selfish of me, but there it is.

I’ve named ELoise’s little buckling, dad, after my father and grandfather. My dad turned 80 this year, so I thought I’d be generous and name a goat after him. He was a little worried that his namesake would be eaten, but I think Peter will find a job land clearing or as a companion to some other animal.

Eloise let Peter nurse just after he was born, but the next morning, she’d step away whenever he tried to make a move toward her underside. She was quite attentive to him otherwise, watching over him and cleaning him, but she would not let him nurse.

For the first week, I held her and let him nurse, and then I decided to give bottle feeding a try since I’d never done that and had heard that bottle fed babies are far tamer. It took me two separate sessions of attempts to get Peter to take the bottle, but once he got it figured out, he became a bottle addict.

I’ve been bottle feeding about three weeks now and love it. He is INCREDIBLY tame. You can take him away from his mother and he’s perfectly happy to go where ever you go.

Here’s a fun movie of him chasing a friend of Spencer’s down on the shores of Lake Washington a few blocks from my house.

One buckling, and a big one at that! I was up until 1:30 waiting for kid number two, but he/she never came. She was in heavy labor for one and a half hours so I had to go in and help. I’d never done that before. I didn’t need to reposition, the huge guy was just stuck.

This strange behavior of mine shocked her and at first and she took offense expressing her strong sentiments by stomping. I’d just kept my hands on her though and after a week or two of this, she has relaxed about the procedure. This morning she gave just a half hearted stomp before standing still. My hope is that this training will help her get used to being milked even before she starts giving milk. Stay tuned on whether or not this works for her.

I have been fostering a pug dog through Seattle Pug Dog Rescue and have decided to adopt him and name him, Marty Feldman. He’s 9 months old, but due to a liver and kidney problem, is expected to live only about 6 years. I wasn’t going to adopt him at first, but then my other pug, Eddie, became very attached to him and he kept Eddie entertained by playing with him. Also, Feldman has an especially docile temperament.

Eddie is my farm pug and like other farm dogs, he is extremely helpful. Eddie is my personal trainer. He makes sure I get out for walks by peeing in the house if I don’t and keeps my son from leaving legos on the floor, by eating them whenever he finds them on the floor. Eddie is what all disciplinarians should be, consistent. Feldman helps out on the farm by keeping Eddie entertained and providing Eddie with companionship. Once Feldman arrived, Eddie stopped trying to have a relationship with my leg every time I ran for the phone. He’s just too tired now given all the playing he does with Feldman.

I don’t like the cultural dualism we’ve got here in America nowadays where animals are either pets, who are treated like children, or farm animals who are treated like commodities. I think it’s wrong that in our culture we treat dogs and cats so well (most of the time) and then buy meat from factory farmers. It’s a system of ethics that has lost its bearings.

In an ideal world, all our domestic animals (farm and pet alike) would be treated equally and all animals would serve some purpose. It’s a good thing Eddie and Feldman are so useful!

Rosie, once best known for being the daughter of celebrity goat, Brownie, is now famous for her starring role in the award winning goat music video, the Goat Justice League Blues.

I write in my book, City Goats, that goats digest their food so thoroughly that if they eat weed seeds, those  seeds, once they have been chewed and ruminated and generally churned and broken down by the goat’s very efficient digestive system, can never sprout forth as nature intended. But, I recently began to wonder if this is in fact true. I read a scientific article titled, “The Efficiency of Chewig During Eating and Ruminating in Goats and Sheep” in the British Journal of Nutrition, which led me to believe nothing could survive the digestive system of a goat, but it focused on measuring the amount of time goats chew and ruminate and the particle size of the particles that make up their tidy pellets. It did not look at whether weed seeds can sprout after being eaten and digested by a goat. And so I wondered.

This question of weed seeds and goats had been rumbling about in my mind when my twelve-year old son came home to say he needed to come up with a science experiment for school. I suggested he test my goats make seeds inviable hypothesis by taking pure goat poop, putting it in a 4 inch pot, and see if anything grows. For a control, he could do the same thing with sterilized soil. I was quite excited about this idea, but the poop element was too uncool and my son came up with the old science fair stand by of creating a battery with a potato.

We had an animated discussion regarding which idea was better which ended with Spencer saying, “Mom, do your own experiment.”

And that’s what I did today. Here it is, probably not in the right format.

Thesis: The digestive system of a goat renders weed seeds inviable.

Set up of control pot: My control is a pot of garden soil that I microwaved for five minutes (thinking this would kill any weed seeds). Two sunflower seeds are planted in this pot, each one inch down. (The idea of adding the sunflower seed is to make sure the medium is capable of sustaining growth).

Set up of experimental pot: My experimental pot is goat poop that I swept up from the goat shed. I had to soak it and smash it up a bit to make it somewhat smooth on the top. As with the control, two sunflower seeds are planted in this pot, each one inch down.

Analyzing Results: If my hypothesis is correct, no weeds will grow in the experimental pot.

There are a few potential flaws I can think of with my experiment. One is that when I swept up the goat poop for the experiment, I got some chicken poop in the mix too and that may have some viable seeds in it. Also, I’m not sure that microwaving wet soil for 5 minutes will render the seeds that might have been in it, inviable. Also, there’s also the possibility that my goats have not been eating any viable seeds. But, I’m starting simple and am curious to see what happens. I may need to do a follow-up experiment where I feed the goats mostly of dandelions for a few days and then collect poop.

I’ll post every week with a photo of the pots. Stay tuned.