Dear Susan Orlean / The Goats of Downtown Los Angeles

Dear Susan Orlean / Goats:

I've never read your best-known work, The Orchid Thief, but I certainly enjoyed the movie upon which it was based. As a regular reader of your blog on The New Yorker's website, I've had mixed feelings about your impending temporary move to Los Angeles from your farm in upstate New York; I've been afraid that one of my go-to bastions of East Coast-ness (refreshed biweekly) was going to abandon me. I regularly read your blog for articulate observations on the very rural, agrarian, and often specifically fowl-focused minutiae which you will likely have to temporarily abandon during your move to the concrete jungle. However, I am happy to see that you have already began to demonstrate your interest in and outreach to the bestial portion of the Los Angeles community, both here and here.

I had read the latter story in the New York Times - bolstering my opinion that the best reporting on the west coast generally comes from the east coast - this evidenced by the fact that after a thorough scouring of the LA Times, I could find no reference to said downtown-toiling goats. (I've long contended that the best local news team in Los Angeles is that of TMZ - and they probably don't care about goats across the street from the downtown courthouse, unless Lindsay Lohan was their for an arraignment and stepped in their shit.) Regardless, I was pleased to find that you, Susan Orlean, had picked up on this story of Angeleno civic interface with the animal kingdom, and I actually think it demonstrates the kind of out-of-the-box thinking that LA at its best is capable of and needs to drum up with greater frequency.

Ms. Orlean, I can assure you that even transplanted out of your upstate farm with all of God's great and small creatures, you will be right at home in Los Angeles. Not only are there plenty of animal lovers and municipally-employed goats to be observed, but if you sit long enough on the patio of the Starbucks at the corner of 26th and San Vicente in Brentwood, a decidedly upscale and residential area, you will hear amid the throaty growls of accelerating Porsches, paradoxically, a rooster crow somewhere in the neighborhood. I've heard it with my own ears. Hopefully this, along with LA's Urban Chicken Enthusiasts, will be enough to satisfy your yen for fowl. It'll be just like back on the farm - only with a macchiato in hand instead of fresh milk. But I assure you, there is more to the animals of LA than how they are so narrowly portrayed in the media:



Sincerely,
Dear Crabby