"Obviously it’s not an occurrence you see every day," said Lt. Brian Karst of Carmel, New York, of the charges against two men accused of breaking into a barn, spray-painting three goats orange and scattering pages from pornographic magazines around them. Actually, as a former member of the Anti-Goat-Painting-and-Porn-Harassment Task Force for upstate New York, I can tell you that this is more common than you might think, and it’s always very disturbing, and entertaining, when it happens.

Police said this incident was apparently prompted by a feud of some kind between the primary goat-painter and the property owner, but would not provide details. Karst alluded to prior incidents by stating that he thought this one "was a situation where this harassment got out of hand," which suggests that there is a certain level of goat painting and pornography scattering that the Carmel police department is prepared to accept. But this went too far.

Drew Gagnon was charged with burglary, criminal trespass, and animal cruelty, while his friend Doug Bisio was charged with criminal facilitation for driving the getaway car. Karst did not say how the goats had been harmed, as opposed to being made more colorful, but a local paper reported that they had become sick after eating the pornography. Not only is porn destroying our entire civilization (by hogging all the Internet bandwidth, I mean), now it’s even making our farm animals ill.

The veterinarian who treated the victims described the act as "torture," evidently because the goats’ private areas had also been painted orange, showing both her deep and admirable concern for our animal friends and the extent to which the word "torture" has now lost all meaning.

The goat torturers have been released pending their arraignment.  They face up to a year in jail.

Link: Yahoo! News