SNOHOMISH COUNTY, WASH. — A goat with roughly a foot of horn on each side of its head spent part of an afternoon in late August doing exactly what goats are not supposed to do in a residential neighborhood: charging at people.
The animal had slipped its pen and was, according to the Snohomish County Sheriff's Office, attempting to ram nearby residents, who wisely stayed indoors and called for help rather than trying to referee the standoff themselves. Two deputies arrived to find a genuinely uncooperative animal.
Body-camera video released by the sheriff's office this week shows the pair taking the goat by its horns and half-wrestling, half-walking it back toward its pen, the animal straining against them the entire way.
This thing is really strong, dude. We literally cannot let go.
A Snohomish County deputy, on the sheriff's office body-camera footage
The deputies eventually muscled the goat back inside its enclosure without anyone — human or livestock — getting hurt, and the office released the footage largely because, as with most escaped-livestock calls, it doubled as unusually good television. Goats are notoriously difficult to corral once loose: their horns give handlers something to grip, but also give the animal considerable leverage to resist, and they are strong for their size relative to what most people expect from a supposedly domesticated barnyard animal.
It is not the only such standoff Washington deputies have documented this year. Sheriff's departments around the state have posted similar videos of loose goats leading officers on foot chases through yards and parking lots, part of a small but reliable genre of local law-enforcement social media content, per local coverage of the incident. This one, at least, ends with the goat returned safely home.
No citations were issued and no injuries were reported from the August 28 call, the sheriff's office said, describing it as a routine loose-livestock response that happened to be unusually well documented. The goat's owner, who was not identified, was notified and the animal was checked over before being left back in its pen for the night. Deputies noted afterward that they would happily take a barking dog call over a determined goat any day of the week.
