Not everyone loves the goats. Yesterday Chicken Corner received the following unsigned communication:

Goats ain't so green after all. Rumor has it they damaged if not killed a bunch of trees by stripping off their bark when used in downtown by the CRA.

There is also a lot of concern about goats being vectors for weeds as they move from site to site with weed seed in their gut and on their fur. Goats don't spew exhaust like mowers do, but weeds are pollution too.

Anonymous included a document for information on invasive plants: http://www.cal-ipc.org/resources/pdf/BioPollution.pdf.

Yes, sometimes goats hurt trees, though Chicken Corner has not heard talk on the street of goats hurting trees during a CRA mission. But weeds as pollution? Chicken Corner begs to differ. I am partial to Echo Park landscape professional Michael O'Brien's definition of a weed: A weed is a plant that is growing where you don't want it to. A weed is a value judgment. And, yes, many of them are hideous; they live to disrupt our sense of order and beauty and unbalance the environment by killing sensitive native flora. Still, Chicken Corner would like to stand up for the purity of the word pollution. Let's not ruin a perfectly good word by mixing up concepts like gone-wild euphorbia and cottonweed plants with PCBs, oil spills, and pig shit methane river dumps. Over-defining/over-stretching a (politically!) useful word can be a form of pollution, too.