Dead Goat Hung at Wrigley Field

Slaying an animal for the sake of a baseball team is not smart

This morning, Chicago police found a goat hanging from the arm of the Harry Caray statue on Addison and Sheffield at 2:40 a.m. Monday. This isn't a new thing; a similar practice occurred in the fall of 2007, just before the Cubs began their first-round playoff series with the Arizona Diamondbacks. The Cubs were swept in three games.

Last year, no one hung a goat, or at least not in a public place where children congregate, and guess what? The Cubs were swept in the first round again. In three games.

If any of this made any sense, people would stop hanging goats. Dead goats haven't won anything, have they? Dead goats are 0-6 in the playoffs. So why keep hanging them? 

These questions are pointless: The offending parties here are presumably Cubs fans, and not the good kind. These are the stupid ones. The really over-the-top destructive ones, the ones that probably went home early Monday morning thinking they had done all Cubs fans a favor by killing something and hanging it from a statue.

It's one thing to buy into Chicago folklore, to think that maybe, just maybe, there is something supernatural about your team's failure. That belief may be ignorant -- the Cubs have doomed themselves for 100 years by playing poorly -- but it's not malevolent.

But when someone feels the need to carve up a goat because they think a cursed member of the same species is responsible for 100 years of losses, that's a personal failure. First of all, and not to get all PETA on you here, killing a goat isn't a humane thing to do unless you're looking for meat, or its fur, or for some other necessity.

We all see how incredibly dumb this all is, even for Cubs fans, right?

Eamonn Brennan is a Chicago-based writer, editor and blogger who hates that these people make him rant like this. You can also read him at Yahoo! Sports, Mouthpiece Sports Blog, and Inside The Hall, or at his personal site, eamonnbrennan.com. Follow him on Twitter.

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