Tag Archives: goats

BOAA, DXE PROTEST (DEAD) GOAT FESTIVAL IN SAN FRANCISCO

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Security guard stands by during protest at the goat cooking demonstration. Photos by Michael Goldberg

Today I joined a group of animal activists in protesting a grotesque annual event held at the Ferry Building in San Francisco called the Goat Festival.

You can read an excellent report about the event by my wife Leslie Goldberg at her Vicious Vegan blog.

Here’s the beginning of her post:

BOAA, DXE PROTEST GOAT FESTIVAL IN SAN FRANCISCO

By Leslie Goldberg

We were at the annual Goat Festival in San Francisco to cause a disruption Saturday. Yup, this morning I wasn’t pecking at my keyboard spouting off about animal rights or about the environment disaster caused by animal food consumption, but rather I took it to the streets with the animal rights groups DXE (Direct Action Everywhere) and BOAA (Berkeley Organization for Animal Advocacy).

The disruption was successful: By chanting (loudly) and holding up signs we managed to make it almost impossible to give a cooking goat sausage demonstration.

A small group of foodies had gathered under a tent in front of the Ferry Building to watch John Stewart-Streit show how to fry up the flesh of a goat and to also have some samples. Stewart-Streit owns a restaurant in Oakland that serves “house-butchered porcine delights.” The onlookers sat on folding chairs apparently unaware they were about to experience an animal rights protest up close and personal.

Security, on the other hand, was aware there was to be a disruption. There were about eight San Francisco police officers and private security guards standing around. The cops kept talking into their radios. The security officers seemed annoyed.

As the goat cooking demo got started and the chef started talking about the “pleasures” of goat consumption, one activist who had been sitting in the audience stood up, and holding a poster of a dog kissing a goat, faced the audience and explained (loudly) about how goats feel, suffer, experience joy and love their families just like us.

Read the entire post here.

– A Days Of The Crazy-Wild blog post –

Interview: ‘Modern Farmer’ Talks Goats With John Darnielle

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The goatman cometh: Darnielle with friend. Photo by John Darnielle.
The goatman cometh: Darnielle with friend. Photo by John Darnielle.

So Modern Farmer magazine gets John Darnielle of The Mountain Goats on the phone to talk about — goats. I mean the entire interview — goats! At one point the interviewer asked John why no songs about goats on any of The Mountain Goats’ albums.

“No, no. I mean — it’s just the band name,” Darnielle said. “And it’s kinda interesting to me, that we’re talking about the animal. I don’t think people ask Deerhoof all the time about deer or about their hooves. They get off scot-free. From the minute I named this band, everyone was like, ‘Mountain Goats? Oh my God!’ And animal names in rock bands are so common. I mean, the Beatles.”

There is some music talk, but in the context of — goats!

Darnielle is something of a metal, and death metal, expert. He wrote an entire book (OK, it wasn’t that long, but still) about Black Sabbath’s Master of Reality. At one point Darnielle is asked why he thinks “goats get featured so often in both metal and Satanic imagery?”

“Heavy metal takes that tradition from Satanist and I wanna say, maybe, Kabbalistic traditions,” Darnielle said. “The goat in mythology, initially, is sacrificed. You have the old Biblical sacrifice. The community murders a goat in expiation for some wrong or another. So if you’re going up against that ideology, than you would champion the thing that got killed for no reason, which is why Satanism and anti-Christian people — which a lot of heavy metal is anti-Christian — would say, ‘Hey, we’re pro-goat.’ And I side with the metal people, [who say] animal sacrifice is nonsense.”

For more of the interview, head over to Modern Farmer.