“Hachette? Never heard of it. I mostly concentrate on small to medium-sized shrubs here.” Image via Public Domain Image.

If you want to work for Amazon, it’s best not to be a human. Case in point: the group of goats Amazon Japan has hired to trim the lawns outside their headquarters.

Monica Kim has reported for Modern Farmer on the goats, which were brought in on a trial basis last summer and have been so successful that Amazon Japan recently doubled their numbers to a current herd of 30-40.

Like many Amazon employees, the goats are seasonal laborers, working one day a week from June to November. Their daily schedule consists of clocking in at 9am, chewing down some weeds, lying around, frolicking (as can be seen in these far too adorable photos), and checking out at 3pm. They have to wear ID cards, but otherwise are free from restrictions on their movements. They also presumably do not have to call themselves “associates,” though they could, you know, in a sarcastic way, in casual goat banter over a daisy, and no one would be the wiser.

In other words, Amazon Japan’s goats have it much, much better than Amazon’s human employees, whose abusive and borderline illegal working conditions we’ve covered many times on this blog. Not only that, but the goats are being touted by management as a perk of the job. According to Kim (who is quoting from the Hatena News),

During breaks, employees can visit the goats and “be healed if you look at the sight of adult goats and kids weeding together”—and who wouldn’t?

Because nothing relieves stress like watching a co-worker and their children blithely snacking in the middle of the day while your monitor counts down the seconds you’ve got left before five more hours of relentless tube-sock fetching. How bad does grass taste again? Not so bad, right? If you chew it a lot? Has a little tang to it, I’ve heard.

Japan has one of the higher percentages of Amazon warehouses per population size (10 for a population of 127 million) but this goat story has been the first insight Western readers have had into conditions there recently, and a number of news sources seized on it as a charming example of mild environmental progressivism on the part of the retailer, with Time, for instance, running an article with the headline “Here’s the Huge Amazon News Nobody is Talking About.”

If you can stomach the absurdity of the situation– and if you like goat photos (which apparently a lot of people do) — sure, ok, it’s the one piece of positive news coverage Amazon has had in the past couple of weeks. Those goats do look like they’re having fun, bounding down clover-covered hills, their intrinsic natures and Amazon’s desires in perfect cosmic alignment for the moment. But just wait ’til the goats try to unionize.