Dumber than a goat award! 
2003 Reader Submission
Pending Acceptance
I don't think this has been submited but is certainly warrents a Darwin Award.
If you want to place my Darwin Forum handle on the page, please do so.
Eric Aka Nobody :)
On May 16, 1991, Carl Hulsey was attempting to further train his 110-pound Billy goat. His crude training methods were designed to extract aggressive behavior thus promoting the home defensive behavior he desired from this goat. Although warned moments before the fatal training lesson by his loving wife, Alma, The 77-year-old Carl, advanced on his student, the goat. "Pa, this goat's going to kill you if you keep that up,"
The method of teaching a goat must have been spawned from Carl’s great experience gained from being a poultry worker, retired. The goat (Snowball) recognized that to be taught by a buffoon required an IQ higher than, well, a goat! Seeing the “beating sick” in Carl’s hand clued Snowball into the fact that another lesson was about to commence. In realizing such, the male goat did what male goats do! It RAMMED! Being stricken in the tummy the man struggled to his feet and was again RAMMED! Beating a hasty retreat to the porch, hoping to have gained safety, Snowball swiftly ascended the stairs and RAMMED him off the porch face first into the dust five feet below, where Carl died from an exploded stomach. The goat remained triumphantly on the porch (maybe to the theme song of Rocky playing in his head).
Snowball was spared euthanasia by a large public uprising stating that “he was just defending himself”. Unfortunately, he was castrated (neutered), and was renamed to be diminutively known now as, “Snow”!
[end of my writing, Eric]
From web site [url=http://www.snopes.com/horrors/animals/snowball.htm]Snopes.com[/url]
Claim:
An abused goat kills its owner . . . and then is saved by animal lovers who thought it acted rightly.
Status:
True.
Origins:
Carl Hulsey was determined to turn his white billy goat, Snowball, into a watchdog, whether Snowball wanted to be one or not. To that end, 77-year-old Hulsey, a retired poultry worker from Canton, Georgia, took to beating Snowball with a stick to make him more aggressive. "Pa, this goat's going to kill you if you keep that up," Alma Hulsey warned her husband. She was right.
On 16 May 1991, Hulsey once again approached the goat, brandishing a stick. This time Snowball landed the first blow. The 110-pound goat attacked his tormentor, butting Hulsey in the stomach, twice knocking him down. Hulsey scrambled onto the porch in an effort to get away. The goat bounded up the steps after him. While Alma Hulsey watched, Snowball rammed his master over the edge. Hulsey fell to the ground five feet below and died where he landed. "Blunt trauma to the abdominal cavity," said the coroner. Snowball had ruptured Hulsey's stomach.
As a dangerous animal who might harm another, by rights Snowball should have been put down. Once the goat's story was known, however, the officials who were to decide Snowball's fate were inundated with pleas to spare the creature. More than 500 protesters from around the nation called Cherokee County animal control after it was announced Snowball might be put to death. Many offered to adopt Snowball.
Some even made death threats. "What happens to the goat happens to you," one caller reportedly warned. There was also talk of a bomb being planted if the goat didn't walk.
Snowball got his reprieve. He was turned over to Noah's Ark, a private animal shelter for neglected and abused animals in Locust Grove, a little town south of Atlanta. Four hours after his arrival, he was laid on a kitchen table and neutered, an operation intended to make him less aggressive. He was also rechristened "Snow".
Why this furor over a goat and the seeming lack of concern for the man whose life it had ended? In the small community Hulsey had been part of, he was well and truly mourned. Yet outside that pocket of acquaintance, sentiment ran the other way -- many animal lovers saw a certain divine justice in his fate. He'd brought harm to an animal, and the animal had struck back.
As Tom Teepen, editor of the editorial pages of The Atlanta Constitution, noted:
We are keener to understand and spare an abused goat than an abused human. Indeed, when a human kills, we sneer at his defense as a dodge -- 'Yeah, yeah sure, his mother didn't love him' - yet we are sentimental about killer goats. We are a very strange animal.
Barbara "dodgy ram" Mikkelson
Last updated:
17 November 1998
Submitted on 01/06/2003
Submitted by:
Eric
Reference:
ay 16, 1991
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