This pictures stirs up emotions deep in the bowels of my psyche and makes my bladder contract as if it were in the final stages of labor.

QUANTUM LEAP BACKWARDS!

I was five.  My first field trip.  I remember my brown bag lunch had a sub sandwich and some Goetze's Caramel Creams.  I'm fairly certain we were at the Toledo Zoo.  My mom, God love her, made me sleep in hair rollers and wear dresses everyday.  So I vividly remember the green plaid dress with the rounded Peter Pan collar along with the white ribbed knee socks and mary janes.  Because, after all, this is appropriate zoo attire. I remember feeling like I'd just walked off the page of a "Dick and Jane" book.

DIGRESSION!  Sorry 'bout that.

We were all given sticker name tags in case we got lost or rebelled and ripped it off our shirt so we could go stare at the kids who went to public school.  The big highlight of any Kindergarten zoo trip is the petting zoo.  A hands on experience!  The rich kids usually had some loose change to buy that universal pellet food that you could feed to every single animal within the confines of the petting area.  Back then we didn't have "Sanitation Stations" every three feet.  So even though the rich kids had the loose change, they also had the Muck Hand for the rest of the day and they sat alone on the bus ride home.

If memory serves, I'd either swiped some pellet food from a rich friend or grubbed it up off the ground.  I was in the process of deciding which beast would be the lucky recipient of my pellets when I was bum-rushed by a horned goat that had a look in his eye that made me pee in my pants a little. Okay, maybe more than a little.  It didn't matter though.  Because while the goat was molesting my upper half, a pot bellied pig was making sure no one saw the pee pee.  I figured the sock would dry before I even got on the bus.  The underpants was a no-brainer.  I stuffed them in that mysterious container found in each individual stall…even though my mom told me to never touch it.  Which I haven't to this very day.

With my Pee Pee Oopsy behind me, I turned my attention toward the goat.  My name-tag and three buttons off my dress were hanging out of his mouth.  With his eyes, he let me know that as soon as he swallowed he was going to rip my face off and give my eye-balls to the pig.  Who, coincidentally, was still hanging around for some reason.  Like maybe there was gonna be a second course.

I remember it took the Zoo employee, my teacher and a 6th grader to pull that friggin' goat off me.  By then, I was laying on the ground in fetal position, sucking my thumb and crying for my Mommy and a bowl of Cocoa Wheats.

No one mentioned anything about it on the way home.  I don't think the teacher told my parents and I got straight in the bath after arriving home.  It was as if this entire incident never happened.  But I'm reminded of it every time I see a goat.  Because I don't just "see" the goat.  I want to harm the goat.  This violent desire comes from a very dark place inside of me where nothing else dwells except Goat Hate.

No.  You don't understand.  I'll pull my car to the side of the road and beat a goat like he stole something.  Beat him DOWN.  My kid now hates goats by osmosis.  It also may have had something to do with me telling her that goats eat babies and poop on toddlers and do even worse things to older children.  Things of which I cannot speak.

So that's the story about the goat that made me pee myself.  I wouldn't have brought it up, but there was this story on the news yesterday about a guy whose goat "mowed" his lawn until the neighbors started complaining about the goat coming over into their yard and saying dirty things to their four Persian cats.

Treat yourself to this little compilation video of goats yelling like humans.  I'm glad they're upset and yelling.