Plano East High School slaughtered Richardson's Berkner Rams on Friday night in the completely metaphorical sense that its football team scored more points (34) than its rival (13). The night before, the slaughter was quite literal.
Members of Berkner's marching band arrived at the high school's football field at around 6 a.m. Friday to find a goat carcass hanging by its ankles from one of the goal posts. The goat was removed fairly quickly by animal control, but not before someone snapped a grainy cell phone picture of the animal and put it on Twitter.
Richardson police have launched an animal cruelty investigation and are "trying to determine who the owner of the goat is and who is responsible," an investigator told The Dallas Morning News.
Logic would suggest this is the work of one of the 2,800 students enrolled at Plano East, which celebrated its homecoming this weekend. So far at least, police have had trouble further narrowing the list of potential suspects.
The response to the dead-goat discovery has been equal parts outrage and disgust.
"It's not really funny, it's not good sportsmanship, and animal cruelty is not something that should be taken lightly," Berkner senior Gabby Gafford told Fox 4.
But before we hunt down the perpetrators and string them up like that poor defenseless animal, it's worth asking whether it's more likely that a bunch of suburban teenagers sought out a live goat and killed it themselves, or whether they went down to one of the halal butcher shops two miles so away in downtown Richardson and bought one that was already dead.
It's also worth pointing out that, as a prank, it doesn't make any sense. Male goats are called bucks, not rams.
