USC students tell goat goodbye after chase through downtown Columbia neighborhood

Jay Gutowski and his roommates thought keeping a baby goat as a pet at their downtown Columbia home would be a fun way to avoid doing yard work.

The USC students renting a house in the Hollywood-Rose Hill neighborhood figured a cute, tiny goat would keep the grass low and provide entertainment for visitors.

So, responding to a listing on Craiglist about two weeks ago, they drove to Anderson County to pick up one.

That’s when they realized they had a problem.

The goat, eventually named “Dalebert” after the friends couldn’t decide between “Dale” and “Albert,” was far too big to be a baby, said Gutowski, 20, who’s from New Jersey and a junior at the University of South Carolina. The goat had horns, another unexpected twist. And it didn’t seem intent on staying in the backyard.

“As soon as we let it out of the cage, the goat just charges at the fence, knocks down the whole fence that we were not expecting at all,” Gutowski said Wednesday. “And everyone was like running away from the goat because we didn’t know what the goat needed. We didn’t know anything about a goat. So we’re all scared of it, putting up barricades by our deck so it couldn’t get up on the deck. We were totally unprepared.”

Those issues escalated last Saturday when Dalebert escaped from the back yard and led nearly two dozen USC students and neighborhood residents on a wild chase for hours.

Gutowski said Dalebert jumped over a low point in his fencing during a storm around 2 a.m. Saturday. Gutowski said he and his friends ran after the goat, only to be driven back by the rain as Dalebert headed toward nearby Rosewood Drive.

“I couldn’t believe how high the thing jumped,” Gutowski said, adding he wasn’t optimistic he would be able to find the goat in the morning. “It was unbelievable.”

They restarted the search the next morning, Gutowski said, splitting into groups to sweep the neighborhood’s roads. Finding the goat, Gutowski said, didn’t turn out to be that difficult.

Getting him back into his cage was a different matter. Gutowski and others chased Dalebert all over the neighborhood, cornering the goat a handful of times, only to watch him escape and scamper away.

Soon, Hollywood-Rose Hill residents were filling a community email thread with reports of a goat on the loose, sharing both amusement at the spectacle and concern for the goat’s well-being.

Caroline Glenn, a Hollywood-Rose Hill resident for roughly two decades, said she remembers seeing an email about the goat that morning, then returning home hours later to find the goat in the middle of the street in front of her home.

“He’s running through the streets. He’s dodging cars. It was very dangerous,” said Glenn, who added she couldn’t help but be amused.

A video Glenn captured and emailed to neighborhood residents shows the goat backed into a corner of a yard, then leaping over the outstretched arms of a would-be captor and taking off down a street.

Another video posted to YouTube shows a similar string of events, this time with Dalebert sprinting between one man’s legs to get away.

“We were all concerned because the guy was probably terrified,” said Winifred Goodwin, a 35-year resident of Hollywood-Rose Hill. “The guys, when they were looking for him, they really did seem panicked.”

Hollywood-Rose Hill resident Rep. James Smith, D-Richland, was working the day Dalebert got loose but said the neighborhood has learned to take such oddities in stride.

“We’re in a university neighborhood,” he said. “I think it’s part of the life in Hollywood-Rose Hill and that community. Students are our neighbors. The university is an important part of our community.”

Dalebert’s several-hour getaway ended at USC’s athletics village, where Gutowski and his friends cornered him a final time and returned him to his cage.

The city of Columbia has an ordinance barring owners from keeping livestock such as goats in dense residential areas within city limits, and on Wednesday, a city Animal Services officer came by to pick up Dalebert and arrange another home – outside the city.

Animal Services’ visit came as a relief to Gutowski, who said he was already working to find a new home for Dalebert. After two weeks with a pet goat, he says he’s learned a few things.

“Don’t go buying animals on Craigslist,” he said.

This story was originally published September 9, 2015 at 6:40 PM with the headline "USC students tell goat goodbye after chase through downtown Columbia neighborhood."