C’EST BON
The grass cutting is greener in Parks. The small St. Martin Parish community has been using sheep to do the mowing around its water tower and water treatment pond for more than two decades — no noisy, high-emission lawn mowers or weed trimmers needed. The program has been so successful — those rams loves them some ewes! — that the town now has a surplus of the cloven-hoofed clover eaters and is selling off more than a dozen. Why didn’t Lafayette think of this? Our founder was a guy named Mouton. Joey Durel, buy us some lamb. Chop chop!
PAS BON
What will 200 residents of a Breaux Bridge neighborhood do now that they are not allowed to leave their back yards? We’re talking about horses, which last week were banned from the small Bayou Teche city’s streets by a vote of the city council on the recommendation of Mayor Jack Dale Delhomme. What about the 200 owners, mostly young African-American males, who have grown up with trail rides and in-town horse clubs? While the council emphasized liability (how many equine-auto collisions have there been lately?), it failed to take into account culture, tradition and just plain occupying a group of kids who will have one less thing to do in the afternoons and on weekends. From the horse’s mouth: “It keeps me and my friends out of trouble,” Jalen Wiltz, 13, told KATC-TV3, “so we don’t be in the streets doing bad stuff.”
COUILLON
Bringing political posturing to dizzying heights, Jefferson Parish state Rep. Kirk Talbot is vowing to push a constitutional amendment in next year’s legislative session that would “protect” Louisiana from national health care reform. Congress of course recessed before settling on anything — there is no single health care reform bill yet, only a handful of competing proposals that still have to be ironed out — but Talbot isn’t taking any chances, telling The Advocate the amendment would say, “Everybody in Louisiana has the right to buy their own insurance, get into the plan of their own choosing.” Louisiana, according to a Census Bureau estimate, has the seventh-highest rate of uninsured residents in the nation at 18.8 percent.