That's what doing shoddy work and pooping on the lawn will get you. It should be noted, however, in their defense: they're goats. It's what they do. Apparently the fine urbanites in Salem objected to the "barnyard odor" that disrupted the ambiance when they visited the park to commune with Nature. They found it a little too - well, Natural.
(Reuters) - A crew of goats brought in to devour invasive plants at a popular park in Oregon's state capital, Salem, have been fired because they ate indiscriminately, cost nearly five times as much as human landscapers and smelled far worse, a city official said on Friday.
The 75 billy and nanny goats were supposed to eat Armenian blackberry and English ivy and other invasive plants choking native vegetation across the 1200-acre Minto-Brown Island Park, the city's largest, in a pilot program last fall.
This here park ain't big enough for the two of us, Billy.
Just what the heck the bureaucrats expected is unclear; you don't just truck 75 goats out and turn them loose, that's just plain stupid. And you don't use billy goats, because they do stink the place up.
Goats are successfully used for this purpose all over the place - when people know what they're doing. You use portable fencing to confine them to specific, targeted locations; you don't just let them wander around, billy-nilly. I had an unbelievable mound of invasive blackberry; I put Goat on a long tether and let her have at it: in just a few weeks, it was dead and gone (the blackberry, that is).
