A new study shows that goats, like humans, have accents. From their little-known propensity for standing on cows to the reason why they’re often depicted as the Devil, here are a dozen fun facts about the Capra aegagrus hircus.
Goats have accents? Of course, leave it to the Brits to find out if goats from England sound sexier. Researchers from Queen Mary University of London have found that goats’ accents change as they grow older and move into different groups. The findings contradict claims that most mammals' voices are entirely genetic. Previously only humans, elephants, dolphins, and a few other mammals were thought to be able to pick up accents.
If you haven’t heard the 2007 Radiolab episode about a goat standing on a cow on the side of the road, do it now. The tale gets stranger and stranger as it evolves into somewhat of a detective story. Apparently, goats do stand on cows, and practically everything else, too, including on people. Goats, after all, originated from the Zagros Mountains in Anatolia, where they had to climb rocks and cliffs, and they can hold their balance in the most precarious places, including trees.
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Can goats have SuperPACS to help them run for office, and if so, are they people? A remote border town in Texas called Lajitas had elected three successive generations of goats as mayors, starting with Clay Henry in the ‘80s, who was known to drink as many as 40 beers a day. Then his son Clay Henry Jr., took over, and finally Clay Henry III. Unfortunately, a local man named Jim Bob Hargrove attacked and castrated the mayor in 2007 because he was jealous of the goat drinking a beer, when blue laws prohibited alcohol sales.
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Buzkashi is the national sport of Afghanistan, and literally translates as “goat-grabbing.” Players on horseback tear at a headless goat carcass and try to control it and bring it to a scoring area. Sometimes a calf is used, since they are less likely to disintegrate.
Animal rights activists are not happy about this. The tiny northern Spanish village of Manganeses de la Polvorosa holds an annual San Vicente de Martir festival to honor Saint Vincent, and how do they do it? They hurl a goat off the top of a 50-foot church belfry to the crowd below, who catch the poor animal with a sheet. Nobody knows when the tradition started, but variations all involve a goat who fell off the tower and was miraculously saved by some villagers who caught it in a blanket. Unfortunately, the goat’s successors aren’t as lucky: some survive the fall, some don’t.
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Goats’ eyes have horizontal slits, which give them deep peripheral vision and allow them to monitor predators in a broad area. Horses, cows, and other hoofed animals have similar pupils, but goats’ irises are usually pale, so they show up more prominently, and are more able to scare people.
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Why is Satan often represented as a goat? In the Bible, he’s never described with horns, hoofed feet and beard. Nor in Milton’s Paradise Lost. Nor Dante’s Inferno. Why? Blame it on the Knights Templar. Legend has it that the Templars had initiation rituals, which weren’t so helpful when they were accused of being homosexuals, heretics, and idolaters and burned at the stake by King Philip the Fair of France in the 1300s. In order to show their loyalty to fellow brothers, they reportedly had to kiss each others’ asses. In order to display courage, they had to spit on the crucifix and pray that God doesn’t strike them down right there. And they were supposedly trained to resist torture, in case the Saracens captured them during the Crusades, and force them to deny Christ and worship a pagan deity in the form of a goat. Under torture, some Templars apparently “confessed” to kissing the head of a dead goat and worshipping the god of the Muslims, calling out the name Muhammad—or Mahomet, which was corrupted to Baphomet. Baphomet was revived in the 19th century by occult figures like Eliphas Levi and Aleister Crowley as a Satanic deity. Those horizontal pupils helped, too.
The legend of college fraternity houses subjecting pledges to sex with goats might not be as widespread as the urban myth suggests, but in 2006 police at Western Kentucky University did find a live goat stuffed into a storage room of the Alpha Gamma Rho house and charged a 19-year-old with animal cruelty. The president of the AGR chapter said the goat kept as a hazing prank to make pledges think they would have to have sex with it, but nobody was going to actually do it. Wow, what a relief.
It’s still winter, and you might even be wearing a sweater. Cashmere first came from the soft necks of goats in the Kashmir region in the 18th and 19th centuries. Cashmere goats produce a double fleece, with a fine undercoat of hair. That’s the source of your soft scarf.
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But they will chew on almost anything. Goats are not grazers, who eat grass. They are browsers, who feed off leaves, shoots, fruits, shrubs and other plants. They will taste and bite anything that might look like plants and wooded vegetation, including cardboard boxes and paper—even labels off, yes, tin cans.
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Ever wonder where that word comes from? Since the 1200s, the young of a goat has been called a kid, and only in 1599 was the extended meaning to a “child” first recorded.
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Yes they can. And bark, or say “what.” Their calls are called bleating.
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