Americana: Of Fowls, Cattle and Creeping Things

It was as though Noah's Ark had docked on the Potomac. The marble stairway to the Capitol swarmed with 82 goats, several dozen chickens, two guinea hens and a mule. The menagerie was turned loose by striking farmers of the American Agriculture Movement, who were dramatizing their demands for higher farm prices. The animals succeeded fully in that mission before being halted by dogs and impounded. They also illustrated, in a way, the odd relationship between Americans and the lesser species that share their turf. It is a relationship that seems to alternate...

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