Local Goatherds on Alert

By Matt Wood in Miscellaneous on Dec 28, 2005 4:22PM

Chicagoist admits to playing the occasional prank during our high school and college days. We may have strung toilet paper around a few backyards, and it's possible we once stole a sorority's holiday decorations and took them on a photo tour of campus. But we always drew the line at dead animal heads. Poor taste, poor taste.

Unfortunately for an 18-year old woman in Palos Heights, not everyone has Chicagoist's maturity and discretion. Someone left a skinned goat's head (CBS 2 says it was a lamb's head) wrapped in a gift box on her porch, with a note saying, "With hugs and kisses from Santa." She's pretty sure she received this little present because she and her friends are vegans, but police are taking it seriously, at least by the Trib's account:

Even though the goat's head looks like the work of pranksters rather than mobsters, police are taking the investigation seriously, [Palos Heights Detective Adam] Nagy said, and were trying to lift fingerprints from the package.

Authorities said they did not know if any local farms were missing a goat.

So rather than going for the obvious explanation that some jokers who knew about this woman's eating habits went to the local butcher and picked up the head, the Trib leads us to believe that the south suburban syndicate is decapitating goats to terrorize teenage vegans. We'd blame the Palos Heights police for pushing such a phony story, but given that the detective's statements are missing from the CBS2 story, it's obvious that the Tribune reporter (unattributed, thankfully) was fishing for today's Orange Alert Special. Not to totally let CBS 2 off the hook though: if you're interested, their website provides a handy way to track "lamb's head" and "vegan" news stories in the future.