Minnesota Prairie Roots

This goat is not to be confused with the heisted goat. Rather this goat was photographed at the Kasota Zoo and is used for illustration purposes only with this blog post.

IF YOU HAVE NOT yet heard the tale out of Mankato about the young stepsisters—we’re talking under age 10—who stole a goat from a zoo in the middle of the night and were caught walking down a street in their pajamas with the goat, then click here.

While this story could have ended not-so-happily, it did. The girls and the goat are fine, although the stepsisters could be in trouble with their parents, or the law.

After lying to the police about how they got the goat, the 6 and 7-year-olds eventually fessed-up and the truth was uncovered. They’d been to a birthday party at Sibley Park Zoo earlier in the day and apparently decided they just had to have a goat.

I heard this story on the 10 p.m. news Monday and laughed and laughed and then laughed some more.

I know, maybe I shouldn’t be laughing. Stealing is wrong. Lying is wrong. But in these days of news stories about natural disasters, war, murders, unemployment, a depressed economy, scandalous politics and more, you have to appreciate an imaginative caper like two kids stealing a goat from a zoo, in their p.j.s, in the middle of the night.

And sometimes you just have to view life with a Betsy-Tacy-Tib perspective.

Betsy, Tacy and Tib, for those of you unfamiliar with that trio, are characters in a series of children’s books written by Mankato author Maud Hart Lovelace and published between 1940–1955. The three, based on real-life friends growing up in Mankato (Deep Valley in the books), get into all sorts of mischief.

The fictional trio made quite a mess in the kitchen when they mixed up “Everything Pudding” combining ingredients like bacon grease, vinegar, onions, sugar, red pepper and more.

Another time they cut each other’s hair.

Betsy cuts Tacy's hair in this snippet from a mural by artist Marian Anderson in the Maud Hart Lovelace Children's Wing at the Blue Earth County Library in Mankato.

And once the three ventured into Little Syria for a picnic lunch. There they encountered a goat. They didn’t steal the goat. He stole from them, grabbing their picnic basket and scattering sandwiches, cookies and hard-boiled eggs in all directions.

Yup, sometimes you have to laugh, whether it’s at the antics of a goat in a book of fiction or the antics of real-life goat thieves who seem like they could have stepped right off the pages of a Betsy-Tacy book.

FYI: The girls with the Betsy-Tacy-Tib mischievous streak and the goat were apprehended along Carney Avenue. Coincidence or not, one of the books in Lovelace’s series is titled Carney’s House Party. And Carney’s surname is Sibley.

WHAT’S YOUR TAKE on this story about the stepsisters who stole the goat from Sibley Park Zoo in Mankato? Share your thoughts by submitting a comment.

© Copyright 2011 Audrey Kletscher Helbling