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After months of preparation, Thwaites had finally achieved his goal: to become a goat. Researching their thought patterns, he learned that goats are most likely “stuck in time, not able to think about the future or the past much, because they probably don’t have episodic memory.”
But why did Thwaites want to become a goat?
In 2014, the 33-year-old British freelance graphic designer was in debt, living with his father, and sending out resumés to no avail. With so much worry on his mind, he thought it would be wonderful to “step away from the complexities of the world and have a lovely holiday, not just ... away from your job (if you have one), but away from your very self.”
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Originally, he sought a grant allowing him to become an elephant and cross the Alps. “I’d ... adapt my bipedal anatomy to that of a quadruped ... develop an artificial prosthetic stomach that would enable me to eat and digest grass ... adapt my sight and hearing and retrain my senses ... so as to experience life from the perspective of an elephant.”
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But he soon saw flaws in his elephant plan. Visiting South Africa and viewing the animals up close, he realised he would need to build the equivalent of a small car to become one, and also learned that elephants felt pain and sadness much like humans. A visit with a shaman, who called his plan “idiotic,” helped him realise that in spiritual terms, he was closer to a goat.
The plan changed.
So he visited Buttercups Sanctuary for Goats, “the United Kingdom’s (if not the world’s) only sanctuary for abused goats,” and its head, “Britain’s foremost goat behaviour expert,” Dr Alan McElligott.
Thwaites learned, to his dismay, that goats do feel stress, especially since they are prey animals; that they’re smart enough to fake a limp when being led somewhere they don’t want to go; and that they “generally hang out in sex-segregated groups, and each group has a well-defined linear hierarchy.” This last part led to an uncomfortable question.
“I assume you’re going to be a male goat?” said Dr McElligott. “Because there are key sex differences.”
Thwaites had considered many aspects of goatdom in researching this project. The possibility of having sex with the animal was not one of them.
“From a Darwinian perspective, sex is the whole point of animal life,” he writes. “However, I am sure my girlfriend would be extremely upset if she were cuckolded by a goat.”
Despite his realisation that having sex with a goat would mean success for his project — reasoning, “I will only have had sex with a goat if I wanted to have sex with a goat, and [that will only have happened] if I have managed to adopt the mindset of a goat” — he avoided this awkward possibility by postponing his goat-change until after August, the goats’ rutting season.
(Fun fact: Since female goats are attracted to male goats by the smell, the males “pee onto their own goaty beards to increase the force of the smell ... [and] make themselves more attractive to females.”)
Resource: news.com.au
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