Is this, like, normal for the Deep South? Does this just happen all the time down there?

(For background, the setup is that a fellow working with a nonprofit river organization was taking some group donors out on a ride on the Chattahoochee:)

Ulseth had boated it a hundred times before. "But, this time," he told me recently, "I saw something white off on the side near the bridge." He pulled the boat over to the bank. "There were eight or nine baby decapitated goats just floating in the water. The ladies flipped their [expletive]."

Ulseth "booked it out of there," he told me. It wasn't the first time a dead goat had been seen in the river — in the nineties, Georgia Power informed [Chattahoochee Riverkeeper] that a goat carcass was caught in a swirling eddy near a power station's intake pipe. (Riverkeeper employees have also come upon grocery carts, sex toys, mannequins, bowling balls, and TV sets, among other objects.) But that morning in October, Ulseth said, marked the beginning of the Chattahoochee's headless-goat era. "After that, I found them there pretty much every single time I'd go out," he told me. "Just bodies, never heads. Sometimes dozens." Ulseth estimates that in the roughly four years since that day he's found around five hundred decapitated goats in the Chattahoochee.

Uh yeah, when you find five hundred decapitated goats on a single river, you don't just go on doing things like normal. You call Rambo in his riverboat to come take a look around for you.

Nobody really knows who's doing this, or why, but some theorize that it could be cartel drug runners practicing the weird quasi-pagan religion of Santeria:

I told Almonte about what was turning up in the Chattahoochee. He didn't sound surprised. "I'm seeing more and more of the drug traffickers using Santería for protection over the last couple of years," he said. "But that's a lot of goats. That would mean they're moving a lot of drugs along that highway."

Oh heck, they really should call Rambo, he knows how to deal with the cartel!

Still, this is the weirdest thing ever. Headless goats by the hundreds. Lord have mercy.

I don't care how lovely Alan Jackson makes it sound ... I, for one, will never ever go down yonder to the Chattahoochee.