Creative Loafing
TALK OF THE TOWN | SCENE & HERD 08.12.04

Animal farm
Orwellian in a non-1984 way
BY ANDISHEH NOUAREE

If you’ve always wanted to own livestock, but worry that your two-bedroom West Paces apartment or Fulton Cotton Mill loft lacks enough pasture, think again. On Sunday, I discovered a whole farm full of barnyard animals that are sized for your intown lifestyle. It’s called Tanglewood Farm.

Tanglewood is nestled (I love that word) in the beautiful rolling hills of Canton. It’s a long drive from downtown Atlanta, but when you get to the sign in Cherokee County that reads, “Welcome to Macedonia,” you can make the drive worth it by pretending that you’ve accidentally driven to southeast Europe.

Upon entering the farm grounds, you get a bucket full of bread and instructions about which animals are OK to feed and which fenced pastures are OK to enter. For no particular reason, me and my bread headed straight to a pen called the School House. It’s sonamed because of a miniature replica schoolhouse, complete with a bell, in which miniature horses (roughly the size of golden retrievers) were lunching on hay. Around the School House,
miniature African pygmy goats frolicked and asked me for bread. They don’t talk. They ask with their soulful, pygmy goat-eyes.

The animals were all friendly. You can pet and even hug them. They were never aggressive about getting my bread, but in an adjacent pen in which the barn was named for the fictional law office of “Dewey Cheatum,” a sheep almost knocked me to the ground while running by. In that same pen, there was a horse with different-colored eyes; one brown and one blue. Just like David Bowie!

None of the barnyard animals smelled bad, which surprised me. In fact, the stinkiest animals on the farm were the five mini Jack Russell pups in a small-fenced enclosure. They were cuter than cuteness itself, but they smelled like puppy pee.

There’s no way I can gracefully work this observation in, so I just have to drop it thusly: If you go, note the farm’s soda machine. In place of a giant soft drink logo, it has a life-sized, full-length photo of deceased actor Gordon Jump, whose famed roles include Maytag TV pitchman, boss at
WKRP, and Neptune, King of the Sea in “Diff’rent Strokes.”