Today’s show is about mountain goats, also known as hillbillies.
If you were reading the news on this day in 2018, you might have found a very strange sounding article from Vice.com about an effort underway in Olympic National Park in Washington state.
They were moving hundreds of mountain goats out of the park by helicopter.
The goats were introduced to the area in the 1920s, and over time, they not only got used to humans being around, they started harassing those humans.
I want to put this delicately: when hikers would take bathroom breaks on the side of the trail, the goats would, um, use the liquid, which had salt and other nutrients they needed but weren’t getting elsewhere
And it’s likely more than a few humans offered food to the goats along the way too.
The goats took all of this too far, hassling humans to the point that they became a nuisance and a safety concern.
Humans decided to remove the goat population from the park.
Some of that meant culling the population, but they also relocated hundreds of goats to places where they are a native species.
Doing that was complicated: they captured goats, blindfolded them, tagged them and flew them by helicopter to trucks that could drive them to their new habitat.
Along the way, wildlife officials said some of the goats started picking up on what was happening and would try and hide out from the relocation team.
That makes me want to write a script for a new action series about helicopter pilots ferrying mountain goats out of national parks, and the goats trying to outrun them.
Today in 1997, a TV show called “An Audience With Elton John” aired, in which he took questions from the audience about his life and career.
One guy asked, if I gave you some words, could you improvise a song around them?
The words came from the guy’s oven manual, and Elton still knocked it out of the park.
A National Park Is Airlifting Hundreds of Mountain Goats That Have Gone Crazy for Human Pee (Vice)
