LAWRENCE | Someone is stealing baby goats from Bob Throop and Jeff Hill, and the two men are certain the predators are humans, not other animals.

Hill and Throop, who run a goat-raising enterprise near Lawrence, say they’ve had about 25 baby goats stolen since March 1.

They suspect the kids are being taken shortly after they’re born and hand-fed until they are slaughtered for some sort of religious rite. Young goats are part of religious meals and celebrations this time of years in Islam, Judaism and Christianity.

“Obviously there’s a lot of cultures that eat goat,” Throop said.

Hill said he thinks someone figured out how to make some quick money off the kids.

“You figure at 40 to 50 bucks a pop, for those 20-plus kids, that’s an easy grand,” Hill said.

And the partners say they’ve seen no blood or carcass parts that would suggest the animals are being stalked by wild predators.

“We haven’t seen as much as a scrap of hair,” Hill said.

The men don’t necessarily want the animals back because they would be hard to raise after being away from their mothers. But they have notified the Leavenworth County Sheriff’s Office because the thefts hurt their operation in several ways.

They planted acres of grass for the young goats to eat this year, and now don’t have enough kids to eat it. Mothers, especially those giving birth to their second or later litters, have udders filled and no babies to feed.

Most important, the newborns would have been the foundation for later herds.

“We’d have been happy to sell the males,” Throop said.

The men hope anyone buying a young goat will check that they are buying from a reputable source.

“We’re after the people who stole them, not the people who received them,” Throop said. “We figure our goats are lost. But we’d certainly like to stop this from going on again. We just want to catch the person responsible.”

The Associated Press