March 24, 2011 • 27 mins
Due to a condition known as Thomsen's disease, the muscles of fainting goats tense up whenever the animal is startled. In this episode, Josh and Chuck break down the science behind this bizarre condition. Tune in and learn more.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve camera.
It's ready. Are you welcome to stuff you should know
from house Stuff Works dot Com. Hey, and welcome to
the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles W Chuck Brant. Yeah,
(00:22):
that's right, that's me now Paul over But yes, not yet, Chuck.
We're getting there, okay, okay, Um, how are you doing.
You're feeling a little sick after Los Angeles? Yes, Josh,
heavy workload and stress usually means Chuck crashes and gets
sick afterwards. Yeah. I came very close. That's what happened
because I was telling you I am a walking ad
(00:43):
for emergency. It works really well. It's good stuff, um, Chuck.
I hope you feel better soon. Thank you. Um. In
the meantime, let's talk about the Satanic symbol that is
the goat. Yeah that the inverted star is supposed to
be a goat head? Is that right? Yes? That is
actually the bah fomat. It's a I think a seventeenth
(01:08):
century French illustration. Um No. Nineteenth century French magician uh
eliphas Levi drew the bah Fomat of Mendi's right and
Mendy's is like the key term here. This is where
the idea that the goat was Satanic came from. Okay,
so back in the day, back when the Greeks were
(01:31):
running around Egypt, let's say the fourth century BC. Um
one of them, Herodotus, wrote of the Mendies, people who
lived along the Nile and venerated and essentially worshiped goats,
specifically male goats, as symbols of fertility, and the Greeks,
doing what they did, eventually ripped this idea off and
(01:54):
labeled their god Pan the the King of the Satyrs,
half god, half man god who like to woo the
ladies and basically press his male goat sexuality onto them. Right. Okay,
so we have the idea that a male goat, a
k a ram in a lot of cases I'm pretty sure,
(02:15):
became the symbol for powerful male sexuality. Right as the
Christian Church came about, sexuality kind of diverged from um reality.
Uh that that I that concept became more and more taboo,
increasingly taboo, until finally you get to the point where um,
we arrived at the Knights Templar, who supposedly venerated Bafomet.
(02:41):
You guys pop up a lot with us. They do.
Um that that that image of Bafo met, not the
nineteenth century one, but the image of a goat head,
which they supposedly idolized. Um was used against them to
persecute them as Satanists and kill them. And from that
point forward, the goat went from pagan god of male
(03:01):
fertility or sexuality to satanic from that moment on to
the point now where you can look at a goat
and you get a touch of evil from it, don't
you know. I was just about to counter and say
that's funny, because goats are the sweetest, most adorable little
creatures on the planet. It depends, first of all, it
depends on their age, It depends on their size, it
(03:23):
depends on how readily you can see those satanic eyes
of their Disagree, it's Satan walking their chuck. Let's just
come out and say it. Okay, well, we know everyone
knows the head pet goats, so you're not gonna get
me to see anything like that. Plus, if you're anything,
you're lackey for the goat lobby. I am. Yeah, what
about fainting goats? Though? I have to agree these are
(03:44):
not satanic they are, they fall into the cute camp, right. Yeah,
it's pretty cute and sad and funny. It's all wrapped
up into one. In fact, I have never experienced such
a range of emotions as when I watched fainting goats
and fainting kittens. Fainting kittens in particular got my goat.
It's awesome because it's hilarious. Chuck. It's so sad looking though,
(04:08):
I know, but then they kind of look around and
look like a stupid kitten and like like a few
times and they're fine. I I urge anyone who hasn't seen,
first of all, fainting goats to go onto YouTube dot com.
That's why, oh you tube dot com. It's a kind
of like a video repository of sorts. You can share.
Type in yeah, yeah, it's amazing. Um you type in
(04:31):
fainting goats and then watch the one with the greatest
number of hits and you will see what we're talking about.
I think it's ten million, eight hundred thousand hits right now.
Watch that one. You'll see what we're talking about. The
rest of the time. You can also, if you want
to treat yourself, type in fainting goat kittens hyphen original
video and you'll see what makes me laugh and makes
(04:52):
Chuck cry. And if you want to really treat yourself,
type in. Oh, that one's adorable. That little lamb, it's like,
is that a lamb or a goat? It's a lamb,
but a lamb is a female goat, right, or it's
a baby goat. Isn't a goat? To mail? Lamb a
baby goat? As a kid? A lamb is a lamb?
Huh oh yeah, lamb is a baby sheep. Yeah, okay,
(05:14):
we're all set. No need for emails, everybody, My autonic goats. Okay,
So yeah, there's other names for these things. Now that
hopefully you've gone and watched this, you're up to speed,
and you don't know we're about to be talking about
because we are going to explain this weird phenomenon that
is feigning goats a k A. As you just said,
my autonic goats. What else, Chuck? Where are some other
awesome names for these things? The Tennessee stiff legs just
(05:36):
good name for a band as his My Autonic goats,
Tennessee wooden legs, nervous goats, and fall down goats, imagine
fall down goats was pretty early in the game. So
that's what Bam bam from flintst Uh. They go by
several different names, Josh, but they are not fading at all. Actually, no, no,
And we should say, if you are too lazy to
(05:58):
go look up this YouTube video and you know what
we're talking about. Basically, um these goats videos of goats
who are being chased by like a farmer or something
with an umbrella, and all of a sudden, they'll just
stiffen up and fall over, and it looks like they
feigned dead away or possibly died and instantly gone into
rigor mortis. It looks like they've been shot and killed
by a sniper exactly. And then after a second they
(06:19):
just kind of get up and and uh, you know,
run away some more. Um and yeah, they're called feigning goats,
but it's not at all. What's going on instead, Chuck,
it's like a an altered startle response. Right. Yeah, it's
a congenital condition. Means they get it since you know
their little baby kid goats, they were born with it.
(06:39):
It's called myotonia congenita. And there's another couple of names,
the Becker type disease or Thompson's disease, and you know
they basically we'll get into the specifics, but what happens
is they tense up like the fight or flight. Like
if an explosion went off right behind you right now,
you tense up and then go Maybe what happens here
(07:00):
is they tense up and they don't untensed. They stay
stiff long enough to fall over on their side as
if they were dead. Appropriately. Robert Lamb, who wrote this article,
points out, it's like that, you know, when you tense
up from a from a fight or a startle or danger,
flight or fight, fight, fight or flight, it's been a while, clearly, um,
(07:23):
and that tension that's relieved almost immediately, that basically your
brain like getting your body like zapped into preparedness, like
ready to run. Stop thinking about tittsie, roll, pops, jerk,
it's time for you to to kick some bottom or
in the goats case, quit thinking about that big patch
of grass. There's a wolf behind you running get out
(07:46):
of here, exactly. But instead of running, they tense up,
they fall over because their muscles take about ten or
twenty seconds to relax. Right. Yes, so you talked about
um myotonic their myotonic goats miyotoni. Yeah, existed more than
just um goats. It exists in humans as well, kittens
we said, yeah, um satisfyde however, so awesome. And my
(08:09):
antonia is basically this, uh, it's a nervous it's a
disorder of the central nervous system, a congenital one. Like
you said, chuck, um, that's characterized by stiff muscles that
they're they're rigid and they take time to relax. Right. Yeah,
I think the voluntary or voluntary muscles we should say,
not like your cardiac muscle or you're voluntary muscles. Um.
The stat I found was that it affects about one
(08:30):
and one hundred thousand people, and in northern Scandinavia one
in ten thousand. Huh, who knew? Well, I guess they
they have a bottleneck up there of some sort because
not that many people want to move up this cannona.
I didn't see any kind of explanation for why there
would be more abundant there. But that's how many it
effects in people. If it's uh, if you have it,
(08:51):
there's some medication, it's not that big of a deal.
Stay exercise, stay loose. Don't walk around big piles of glass,
I would say, are beds of nails. You don't want
to fall on anything like that. Maybe you shouldn't be
driving a car. But I don't think humans actually stiffen
and fall over like the goats. I think it's more
of a you know, temporary stiffening and or again, as
(09:12):
Robert Lamb put it, a full body Charlie horse, but
without the pain. Yeah. Yeah, they say they don't feel pain.
I don't know about that. Yeah, we'll get into that
in a second. But there's a there's a similar condition
to called um myo clonus and um it's actually the
basis of my favorite, probably my favorite um physiological trait
(09:34):
of humans, the myoclonic jerk. You know, when you're falling
asleep and then all of a sudden you go and awake. Yeah, yeah,
that happens to me. And if you'll notice, most of
the time you're dozing and you're you're dreaming of maybe
falling down a stair or something like that. So apparently
your brain is either confused that you are in fact falling,
(09:55):
or it does it doesn't understand why you're why your
muscles are relaxing and some weird way, and it's jolting
you awake. Um or it thinks you're dying and it's
railing against dying, trying to get your heart going again.
Either way, thank you, body and mind. But another another
name for his, the hypnic jerk. The hypnic jerk. It's
(10:17):
just great. Do you like it when it happens to
you or just it's so it's just funny. Yeah, yeah, yeah,
that it's a weird feeling. It's sort of like when
you when you almost fall back in a chair and
you catch yourself. There's nothing more like, you know, thrilling
to the body than that that, oh my gosh, I'm
going to die here in one second exactly. So you're
you're it's thrilling because your muscles tense up. You have
(10:39):
to wonder, if you're just sitting there for ten or
twenty seconds, does your brain Your brain apparently would know
that there's no longer any danger, but you can't move,
which I imagine would kind of be kind of stressful.
And we know that the brain knows that there's no
longer any danger because the actual um disorder is on
the cellular level in the muscles, right Yeah, there's a
(11:02):
gene Josh called the c l c N one, the
chloride channel one gene, and it's involved in the production
of proteins, which are you know, proteins are good for
muscle relaxing and contracting and stuff like that. Well, yeah,
and chloride uh ion specifically, right, Yeah, what's the deal?
Too much chloride? Yeah, you will you want remember check
(11:23):
the point of being alive as a functioning body, as homeostasis, right, right,
So you want um an equal amount or a relatively
comparable amount of positively charged sodium ions which tell your
muscle to contract and negatively charge chloride ions which they
go ahead and relax muscles. Right, Oh, there's not enough
chloride in this case. Yes, so there's an abundance of
(11:46):
sodium and not enough chloride, which means that when you
when the cells are innervated, the muscle cells are innervated
with an electrical impulse from the brain turns up. It
takes them longer to relax because there are to whack
because this gene is not expressing those chloride ions like
that should be. But so it's not the brain any
(12:08):
longer thinking that we're afraid or that there's a danger.
It's the muscles. It's all in the muscles, that's right.
And it is hereditary. It can be dominant or ascessive,
meaning either one of your parents can have the gene
or both. Not too picky there, And uh, the differences
with the goats is they're actually bread to encourage this, right,
(12:31):
and here you mentioned something a second ago, um that
kind of smacked of the ethics of it, right, I
don't remember what it would be, kind of like, let's
go to well, just people laughing. Every time I see
those videos, I think the goats, you know, they're all
they're they're roaming around their pin and then I get
the feeling they see people coming, they're like, oh god,
(12:53):
here we go again. Some jerk is gonna shoot a
gun in the air or something. We're all gonna fallow
and they're gonna laugh at us. Very funny, ha ha,
right exactly, So here we go again, we go again,
And every time they see a human without fail, I'm
sure human does that to that, and the humans laugh
and think it's the funniest thing I've ever seen. The
goats are just like yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And actually
there's two reasons that fainting goats are bred these days.
(13:16):
One is for novelty because they do that, and another
is for meat. Basically, Yeah, that made me sad. I
thought it would just be strictly novelty and having them
as a pet. No. And initially, I mean that's what's
what most livestock goats are used for his meat. And
frankly they're delicious. But um, I wouldn't know they're so delicious. Um.
(13:40):
But if you think of them as satanic, you can
eat them all day long. It's like you're eradicating evil
by eating the goat. You know what I'm saying. Give
me one of those evil satanic goat tacos. I want
to do my part. Can I give you like a
tad of history? Do you want to talk about the
history of it? Okay, I know we're hopping around here right,
(14:00):
go on fire like b But the um, the reason
that Tennessee stiff legs or fall down goats and some
people call them are called Tennessee stiff legs or Tennessee
wooden legs is because they were brought down from Nova
Scotia allegedly by a farmhand named John Tinsley. That's what
(14:20):
they think. Yeah, from what I saw that was the
likeliest explanation. Yeah, to Marshall County, Tennessee in the late
eighteen hundreds eighties. Yep, and he started breeding them, which
uh is called unnatural selection. Will get to that in
a second, but um, this, these the goats were originally
not bred for novelty, right. It took a hundred years
(14:41):
for them to really start to be bred for novelty.
They were bred because Chuck, as you pointed out, their
muscles don't atrophy, they do the opposite, right. Well, yeah,
I mean if you think there's muscle waste going on,
think again, because it actually makes the animal much leaner
for slaughter. Right. It's hard for me even say that, right.
So there's because of all the tensing and untensing that
(15:03):
they do more than the average animal. They're kind of bulk.
They're ripped there, so they have a loaf their lean meat,
but there's a lot of meat to um to muscle
as well, so they're prized for their meat. And apparently
they're they're propensity toward um myotonism to tensing up. Painting
(15:26):
prevents them from keep from climbing fences, which is a
big problem when you're keeping goats. His livestock. They like
to just hop right over a fence. Who erect for him? No,
my goats loved being pet goats, I'm sure. Well. No,
we had a big pen and they were actually in
there with the dogs. We had two dogs and two
goats and they were I mean the goats I think
(15:47):
took their cues from the dogs because they were very,
very playful. And uh, I used to play games with
my goat, Nestor all the time. Whatever happened, uh Nestor, well,
Billy died, which is very sad. And then of course,
and then Nestor. We eventually were like, you know, we
we need to move Nestor out to a farm. So
we this lady took him and Nestor wrote it back
(16:07):
to the truck with me with his head on my
lap the whole way. And what the lady dude to Nestor?
Do you think? I think she kept Nestor as a goat.
And that's the story I'm sticking to that Nestor was
a pet until he died of old age. Has a
beautiful story each other. Yeah, um, okay, so good. So
your your goats fared very well. I'm glad to hear that.
I remember the ghasts at my birthday party. They one
of them was a housecoat remember, oh yeah, house goat. Um.
(16:32):
So there was an actual reason that feigning goats were
bred initially, and it wasn't for kicks. The Tennessee farmers
of the eighteen eighties. Actually we're a little more soulful
than the ones today, And it wasn't funny back then.
Somebody right, right, yeah, I don't laugh at that. I
(16:53):
can't say it. I just had like eighty great jokes.
S are you talking about the protection of the herd?
Not yet? Okay. So the goats become an established breed
of their own by the nineteen fifties, and about that
time they started to leave Tennessee. I think for Texas
was the next place that they really spread out. But
it wasn't until the nineteen eighties that the the goats
(17:15):
were really diverged into two not necessarily two different breeds
because they haven't separated yet. But there's one line that's
generally bred for meat, like the original version, and the
other line is bred as a novelty, and they tend
to be smaller and just faint like that, yes, longer, yeah,
(17:36):
because if you just kind of leave it alone. Um,
the the myotonia is worse as a younger worse early
in life. Yeah, they get kind of used to it
sometimes more they adapt to it. They're not as scared
later in life. So yeah, younger goat is more prone
to fall over, exactly so. But I think if you
(17:56):
compare an adult, um fainting goat bread in that line
to be a novelty to a goat that was bred
for its meat of the same age, the novelty goats
can probably fall over at the drop of a hat,
still right, right, because farmer thinks that's funny. Well, the
other reason that that Robert says they can't find much
(18:16):
evidence of this anymore, but I guess back in the
day they would, and this sort of makes sense, they
would they would add some of these fainting goats to
their herd of regular goats in case there were predators around.
A pack of wolves come up, scares the little pebbly
dodo out of these goats, and then the stiff goats
fall over and get eaten while the other ones take
(18:39):
off and run. So it essentially it's almost like they're
not bait. But uh, you know, a much easier kill
keep the wolves occupied, so the rest of them can escape.
You know what they are, what sacrificial lamb? Yeah, you're right,
that's exactly what they are. But there's no evidence that
that's really the reason that they're breeding them. No, and
(19:00):
there's apparently not much evidence that or how how much
that was used, as I think it could have just
been a good idea, right, Yeah, so Chuck, the idea
of like make no, no, no mistake. My antonia is
a um it's a deficiency, a disorder, not a desirable trait.
So the idea of taking because it's an undesirable trait
(19:25):
under natural selection, it shouldn't exist, right, because if you
take a fainting goat out in nature, like you said,
along with the herd of sheep or other goats or whatever,
now they'll they'll be the first eaten and then they
won't have a chance to reproduce eventually, and it'll that
trade to die out. But then being um bred for
(19:45):
that for an undesirable trait and then protected by humans,
whether by a fence or you know, like it, he'll
be with he'll a billy with the shotgun or whatever.
That's called unnatural selection, right, nothing natural about it? No,
or artificial selection is another way to put it. And
anytime something like that happens, there's gonna be some people,
probably in an organization called Peter, that might stand up
(20:07):
and say, I don't know if this is such a
cool thing for humans to do. And Peter, as expected,
isn't the biggest fan of raising feigning goats. Humane society
isn't so worried about it. Um they say there's a
lot more breeding issues in the world that we should
be more concerned about. And neither one of them have
an official stance. But no, the woman from Peter that
(20:29):
Robert interviewed in this article sounded like she hadn't heard
of feigning goats until he called her. Yeah, that's the
impression I got. Oh yeah, the quote is a little vague,
isn't it. Yeah, yeah, she just like the standard Peter quote,
just plug in the animal. Well, who knows. There is
no official stance though, so maybe maybe Robert alerted her
to this whole phenomena. But they have an official stance
(20:51):
now and it stopped breeding feigning goats. It's a little
late for that, though. It's a recognized and um prized
as a separate American breed of goat. There's about three
thousand to five thousand of them running around and then
falling over right, um, and they don't look like they're
going anywhere. UM. The Livestock Conservancy, I think is what
it's called. UM suggests that this uh, this breed of
(21:14):
goat be very much UM protected and taken care of
and conserved. Is I guess the best word to use.
Did I tell you about Emily and the little baby
goat at the winery at the winery and Athens. No,
we went to uh right before this l a trip.
You know, we went over to Santa Barbara for one
country and we went in this one winery and as
(21:34):
we were going in, there was a guy with a
dog outside, and you know, of course we attacked this
dog and repetting it. He said, yeah, they wouldn't let
it in because they got a goat, a baby goat
in there. So Emily here's this, of course, and it's
just like in the inside saying where's the goat? Where's
the goat? This lady has a probably about a six
week old kid in her arms, wrapped in a blanket.
(21:55):
That's um has some sort of physical ailment, not feigning
goats in Rome. It was part human, part human. It
had human hands. Um no, but she had this little
baby kid and uh, you know, Emily goes over and
starts drooling, and the lady says, do you want to
hold it? And in less than a second the goat
swap had been made, and you know, for the next
twenty minutes, this goat is literally like nuzzling Emily in
(22:17):
the neck. And I took about twenty pictures of the
range of emotions on Emily's face at all. There wasn't crying,
it was just it was a type of ecstasy that
you rarely see in an adult human female. Very cute.
You're like a long story short. We own that goat now? Yes, yeah, no,
not true. My aunt used to have a pigmy goat
in California along the Russian River. Did they not get big?
(22:39):
I guess hence the I would say a pigmy fainting
goat would be about the cutest combination, especially one that
like asked to shine your shoes with like big Those kids,
so man, I can't watch that. Yeah, it looks it
just doesn't look right. It's awesome. I think kids they
don't look like they're hurt. They don't look injured. They
(23:00):
just look surprised every time. And then fine, well, kittens
look surprised with everything. They just they have that constant
look at surprise. Anything else. No, we've touched on the
satanic nature of goats, meat goats, fainting goats, fainting kittens,
unnatural selection tennessee, uh, Texas the nineteenth century. And that's
(23:24):
about it, right, Emily's a natural love of animals, my
iconic jerks. Yeah, everything's right on. Uh. And now you know,
when you see these videos and you show your buddies,
you can now tell people exactly what's going on. Say,
they're not fainting at all. Actually, yeah, stupid. So if
you want to learn more about fainting goats, remember go
(23:46):
to YouTube why are you tube dot com and type
in fainting goats and then fainting goat kittens. It doesn't
really make sense. It could just be fainting kittens, but
still um and you'll see some hilarity. You can also
learn more about feigning goats in a very well written
and well research article by Robert Lamb with stuff to
Blow your mind How fainting goats work. Type that into
(24:09):
the handy search bar and how stuff works dot com
And now we'll bring that up, and that means I
just brought up listener, Matt. That's right, Josh, I'm gonna
call this a real c s I. Dude. This is
from ED in Chico, California. Hey, Josh and Chuck and Jerry.
I'm a crime scene investigator for a municipal police department
(24:30):
in rural northern California. Being a c s I is
just one of my collateral assignments. I'm also an evidence
technician and have a couple of other titles depending on
who has given me orders that day. Nearly every agency
in my area has trained cops or civilians to be
a c s I when needed, not as a standalone assignment,
so that kind of answers one of the questions we had.
(24:51):
I showed interest in being a c s I when
I started my evidence assignment four years ago and was
sent to Basic c s High School and later Advanced
c s I Crime Scene Reconstruction School. He's skipped right
over intermediate yeah, I guess. And finally, blood spatter analysis.
We also do monthly in house training on topics like photography, trajectories,
(25:13):
DNA collection, buried body excavation, et cetera. Our c s
I or jacks of all trades since our agencies are
too small to be able to afford specialized positions. Your
show was very well researched and had all the highlights
of blood spatter and forensic photography. And as a sidebar,
while we do have two big, expensive two thou do
(25:34):
sl our cameras, we really only use them for the
most specialized photos like nighttime crime scenes. Of time they
use a point and shoot from Walmart. Really, yeah, I
could see that though, I mean like that. The technology
has gotten good enough so that I'm sure I know,
but it would just seem weird if you saw dexter
like walk up a little point and shoot. Yea. And
(25:56):
plus I think if you were the family of like
a murder victim and you saw some guy walk and
point to be like, are you even supposed to be?
How about a real camera? Yeah about a little respect.
You mentioned blood voids at a crime scene. We call
them blood shadows. Oh, I like them one to enjoy
being a c s I. But like Josh said, ages Ago,
(26:17):
television ain't nothing like reality. I can't stand watching those shows.
They're drive me crazy, but they're not based in reality.
Writing in reality, DNA evidence takes one to two months
and latent prints can take four or five months, not
four to six minutes. Yeah. And the other thing is
is like everybody is just this jack of all trades, like, oh,
I got these prints off of this scene, and I'm
(26:39):
going to go analyze them, and I'm going to go
like shake down the bad guys. You know, it's like
spend more money on an ensemble. Will you? Thank you?
Ed from Chico. Oh that was it. Yeah, sorry to
end your letter with a rant from me. Thank you
very much for your illuminating letter. We appreciate it. We
(27:01):
want to hear from you. First of all, you can
go um check us out on Facebook, Facebook, dot com,
slash stuff you should know. You can follow us on Twitter,
s y s K podcast, and you can join our
QB team k I v A dot org slash Team
slash Stuff you should Know. You can also always email us,
and specifically, if you have ever tampered with natural selection
(27:24):
through artificial selection, we want to hear about it. Send
us an email about this, all right, Chuck, that's right.
That's stuff podcast at how stuff works dot com for
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(27:45):
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thousand twelve camera. It's ready, are you
Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve camera.
It's ready. Are you welcome to stuff you should know
from house Stuff Works dot Com. Hey, and welcome to
the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles W Chuck Brant. Yeah,
(00:22):
that's right, that's me now Paul over But yes, not yet, Chuck.
We're getting there, okay, okay, Um, how are you doing.
You're feeling a little sick after Los Angeles? Yes, Josh,
heavy workload and stress usually means Chuck crashes and gets
sick afterwards. Yeah. I came very close. That's what happened
because I was telling you I am a walking ad
(00:43):
for emergency. It works really well. It's good stuff, um, Chuck.
I hope you feel better soon. Thank you. Um. In
the meantime, let's talk about the Satanic symbol that is
the goat. Yeah that the inverted star is supposed to
be a goat head? Is that right? Yes? That is
actually the bah fomat. It's a I think a seventeenth
(01:08):
century French illustration. Um No. Nineteenth century French magician uh
eliphas Levi drew the bah Fomat of Mendi's right and
Mendy's is like the key term here. This is where
the idea that the goat was Satanic came from. Okay,
so back in the day, back when the Greeks were
(01:31):
running around Egypt, let's say the fourth century BC. Um
one of them, Herodotus, wrote of the Mendies, people who
lived along the Nile and venerated and essentially worshiped goats,
specifically male goats, as symbols of fertility, and the Greeks,
doing what they did, eventually ripped this idea off and
(01:54):
labeled their god Pan the the King of the Satyrs,
half god, half man god who like to woo the
ladies and basically press his male goat sexuality onto them. Right. Okay,
so we have the idea that a male goat, a
k a ram in a lot of cases I'm pretty sure,
(02:15):
became the symbol for powerful male sexuality. Right as the
Christian Church came about, sexuality kind of diverged from um reality.
Uh that that I that concept became more and more taboo,
increasingly taboo, until finally you get to the point where um,
we arrived at the Knights Templar, who supposedly venerated Bafomet.
(02:41):
You guys pop up a lot with us. They do.
Um that that that image of Bafo met, not the
nineteenth century one, but the image of a goat head,
which they supposedly idolized. Um was used against them to
persecute them as Satanists and kill them. And from that
point forward, the goat went from pagan god of male
(03:01):
fertility or sexuality to satanic from that moment on to
the point now where you can look at a goat
and you get a touch of evil from it, don't
you know. I was just about to counter and say
that's funny, because goats are the sweetest, most adorable little
creatures on the planet. It depends, first of all, it
depends on their age, It depends on their size, it
(03:23):
depends on how readily you can see those satanic eyes
of their Disagree, it's Satan walking their chuck. Let's just
come out and say it. Okay, well, we know everyone
knows the head pet goats, so you're not gonna get
me to see anything like that. Plus, if you're anything,
you're lackey for the goat lobby. I am. Yeah, what
about fainting goats? Though? I have to agree these are
(03:44):
not satanic they are, they fall into the cute camp, right. Yeah,
it's pretty cute and sad and funny. It's all wrapped
up into one. In fact, I have never experienced such
a range of emotions as when I watched fainting goats
and fainting kittens. Fainting kittens in particular got my goat.
It's awesome because it's hilarious. Chuck. It's so sad looking though,
(04:08):
I know, but then they kind of look around and
look like a stupid kitten and like like a few
times and they're fine. I I urge anyone who hasn't seen,
first of all, fainting goats to go onto YouTube dot com.
That's why, oh you tube dot com. It's a kind
of like a video repository of sorts. You can share.
Type in yeah, yeah, it's amazing. Um you type in
(04:31):
fainting goats and then watch the one with the greatest
number of hits and you will see what we're talking about.
I think it's ten million, eight hundred thousand hits right now.
Watch that one. You'll see what we're talking about. The
rest of the time. You can also, if you want
to treat yourself, type in fainting goat kittens hyphen original
video and you'll see what makes me laugh and makes
(04:52):
Chuck cry. And if you want to really treat yourself,
type in. Oh, that one's adorable. That little lamb, it's like,
is that a lamb or a goat? It's a lamb,
but a lamb is a female goat, right, or it's
a baby goat. Isn't a goat? To mail? Lamb a
baby goat? As a kid? A lamb is a lamb?
Huh oh yeah, lamb is a baby sheep. Yeah, okay,
(05:14):
we're all set. No need for emails, everybody, My autonic goats. Okay,
So yeah, there's other names for these things. Now that
hopefully you've gone and watched this, you're up to speed,
and you don't know we're about to be talking about
because we are going to explain this weird phenomenon that
is feigning goats a k A. As you just said,
my autonic goats. What else, Chuck? Where are some other
awesome names for these things? The Tennessee stiff legs just
(05:36):
good name for a band as his My Autonic goats,
Tennessee wooden legs, nervous goats, and fall down goats, imagine
fall down goats was pretty early in the game. So
that's what Bam bam from flintst Uh. They go by
several different names, Josh, but they are not fading at all. Actually, no, no,
And we should say, if you are too lazy to
(05:58):
go look up this YouTube video and you know what
we're talking about. Basically, um these goats videos of goats
who are being chased by like a farmer or something
with an umbrella, and all of a sudden, they'll just
stiffen up and fall over, and it looks like they
feigned dead away or possibly died and instantly gone into
rigor mortis. It looks like they've been shot and killed
by a sniper exactly. And then after a second they
(06:19):
just kind of get up and and uh, you know,
run away some more. Um and yeah, they're called feigning goats,
but it's not at all. What's going on instead, Chuck,
it's like a an altered startle response. Right. Yeah, it's
a congenital condition. Means they get it since you know
their little baby kid goats, they were born with it.
(06:39):
It's called myotonia congenita. And there's another couple of names,
the Becker type disease or Thompson's disease, and you know
they basically we'll get into the specifics, but what happens
is they tense up like the fight or flight. Like
if an explosion went off right behind you right now,
you tense up and then go Maybe what happens here
(07:00):
is they tense up and they don't untensed. They stay
stiff long enough to fall over on their side as
if they were dead. Appropriately. Robert Lamb, who wrote this article,
points out, it's like that, you know, when you tense
up from a from a fight or a startle or danger,
flight or fight, fight, fight or flight, it's been a while, clearly, um,
(07:23):
and that tension that's relieved almost immediately, that basically your
brain like getting your body like zapped into preparedness, like
ready to run. Stop thinking about tittsie, roll, pops, jerk,
it's time for you to to kick some bottom or
in the goats case, quit thinking about that big patch
of grass. There's a wolf behind you running get out
(07:46):
of here, exactly. But instead of running, they tense up,
they fall over because their muscles take about ten or
twenty seconds to relax. Right. Yes, so you talked about
um myotonic their myotonic goats miyotoni. Yeah, existed more than
just um goats. It exists in humans as well, kittens
we said, yeah, um satisfyde however, so awesome. And my
(08:09):
antonia is basically this, uh, it's a nervous it's a
disorder of the central nervous system, a congenital one. Like
you said, chuck, um, that's characterized by stiff muscles that
they're they're rigid and they take time to relax. Right. Yeah,
I think the voluntary or voluntary muscles we should say,
not like your cardiac muscle or you're voluntary muscles. Um.
The stat I found was that it affects about one
(08:30):
and one hundred thousand people, and in northern Scandinavia one
in ten thousand. Huh, who knew? Well, I guess they
they have a bottleneck up there of some sort because
not that many people want to move up this cannona.
I didn't see any kind of explanation for why there
would be more abundant there. But that's how many it
effects in people. If it's uh, if you have it,
(08:51):
there's some medication, it's not that big of a deal.
Stay exercise, stay loose. Don't walk around big piles of glass,
I would say, are beds of nails. You don't want
to fall on anything like that. Maybe you shouldn't be
driving a car. But I don't think humans actually stiffen
and fall over like the goats. I think it's more
of a you know, temporary stiffening and or again, as
(09:12):
Robert Lamb put it, a full body Charlie horse, but
without the pain. Yeah. Yeah, they say they don't feel pain.
I don't know about that. Yeah, we'll get into that
in a second. But there's a there's a similar condition
to called um myo clonus and um it's actually the
basis of my favorite, probably my favorite um physiological trait
(09:34):
of humans, the myoclonic jerk. You know, when you're falling
asleep and then all of a sudden you go and awake. Yeah, yeah,
that happens to me. And if you'll notice, most of
the time you're dozing and you're you're dreaming of maybe
falling down a stair or something like that. So apparently
your brain is either confused that you are in fact falling,
(09:55):
or it does it doesn't understand why you're why your
muscles are relaxing and some weird way, and it's jolting
you awake. Um or it thinks you're dying and it's
railing against dying, trying to get your heart going again.
Either way, thank you, body and mind. But another another
name for his, the hypnic jerk. The hypnic jerk. It's
(10:17):
just great. Do you like it when it happens to
you or just it's so it's just funny. Yeah, yeah, yeah,
that it's a weird feeling. It's sort of like when
you when you almost fall back in a chair and
you catch yourself. There's nothing more like, you know, thrilling
to the body than that that, oh my gosh, I'm
going to die here in one second exactly. So you're
you're it's thrilling because your muscles tense up. You have
(10:39):
to wonder, if you're just sitting there for ten or
twenty seconds, does your brain Your brain apparently would know
that there's no longer any danger, but you can't move,
which I imagine would kind of be kind of stressful.
And we know that the brain knows that there's no
longer any danger because the actual um disorder is on
the cellular level in the muscles, right Yeah, there's a
(11:02):
gene Josh called the c l c N one, the
chloride channel one gene, and it's involved in the production
of proteins, which are you know, proteins are good for
muscle relaxing and contracting and stuff like that. Well, yeah,
and chloride uh ion specifically, right, Yeah, what's the deal?
Too much chloride? Yeah, you will you want remember check
(11:23):
the point of being alive as a functioning body, as homeostasis, right, right,
So you want um an equal amount or a relatively
comparable amount of positively charged sodium ions which tell your
muscle to contract and negatively charge chloride ions which they
go ahead and relax muscles. Right, Oh, there's not enough
chloride in this case. Yes, so there's an abundance of
(11:46):
sodium and not enough chloride, which means that when you
when the cells are innervated, the muscle cells are innervated
with an electrical impulse from the brain turns up. It
takes them longer to relax because there are to whack
because this gene is not expressing those chloride ions like
that should be. But so it's not the brain any
(12:08):
longer thinking that we're afraid or that there's a danger.
It's the muscles. It's all in the muscles, that's right.
And it is hereditary. It can be dominant or ascessive,
meaning either one of your parents can have the gene
or both. Not too picky there, And uh, the differences
with the goats is they're actually bread to encourage this, right,
(12:31):
and here you mentioned something a second ago, um that
kind of smacked of the ethics of it, right, I
don't remember what it would be, kind of like, let's
go to well, just people laughing. Every time I see
those videos, I think the goats, you know, they're all
they're they're roaming around their pin and then I get
the feeling they see people coming, they're like, oh god,
(12:53):
here we go again. Some jerk is gonna shoot a
gun in the air or something. We're all gonna fallow
and they're gonna laugh at us. Very funny, ha ha,
right exactly, So here we go again, we go again,
And every time they see a human without fail, I'm
sure human does that to that, and the humans laugh
and think it's the funniest thing I've ever seen. The
goats are just like yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And actually
there's two reasons that fainting goats are bred these days.
(13:16):
One is for novelty because they do that, and another
is for meat. Basically, Yeah, that made me sad. I
thought it would just be strictly novelty and having them
as a pet. No. And initially, I mean that's what's
what most livestock goats are used for his meat. And
frankly they're delicious. But um, I wouldn't know they're so delicious. Um.
(13:40):
But if you think of them as satanic, you can
eat them all day long. It's like you're eradicating evil
by eating the goat. You know what I'm saying. Give
me one of those evil satanic goat tacos. I want
to do my part. Can I give you like a
tad of history? Do you want to talk about the
history of it? Okay, I know we're hopping around here right,
(14:00):
go on fire like b But the um, the reason
that Tennessee stiff legs or fall down goats and some
people call them are called Tennessee stiff legs or Tennessee
wooden legs is because they were brought down from Nova
Scotia allegedly by a farmhand named John Tinsley. That's what
(14:20):
they think. Yeah, from what I saw that was the
likeliest explanation. Yeah, to Marshall County, Tennessee in the late
eighteen hundreds eighties. Yep, and he started breeding them, which
uh is called unnatural selection. Will get to that in
a second, but um, this, these the goats were originally
not bred for novelty, right. It took a hundred years
(14:41):
for them to really start to be bred for novelty.
They were bred because Chuck, as you pointed out, their
muscles don't atrophy, they do the opposite, right. Well, yeah,
I mean if you think there's muscle waste going on,
think again, because it actually makes the animal much leaner
for slaughter. Right. It's hard for me even say that, right.
So there's because of all the tensing and untensing that
(15:03):
they do more than the average animal. They're kind of bulk.
They're ripped there, so they have a loaf their lean meat,
but there's a lot of meat to um to muscle
as well, so they're prized for their meat. And apparently
they're they're propensity toward um myotonism to tensing up. Painting
(15:26):
prevents them from keep from climbing fences, which is a
big problem when you're keeping goats. His livestock. They like
to just hop right over a fence. Who erect for him? No,
my goats loved being pet goats, I'm sure. Well. No,
we had a big pen and they were actually in
there with the dogs. We had two dogs and two
goats and they were I mean the goats I think
(15:47):
took their cues from the dogs because they were very,
very playful. And uh, I used to play games with
my goat, Nestor all the time. Whatever happened, uh Nestor, well,
Billy died, which is very sad. And then of course,
and then Nestor. We eventually were like, you know, we
we need to move Nestor out to a farm. So
we this lady took him and Nestor wrote it back
(16:07):
to the truck with me with his head on my
lap the whole way. And what the lady dude to Nestor?
Do you think? I think she kept Nestor as a goat.
And that's the story I'm sticking to that Nestor was
a pet until he died of old age. Has a
beautiful story each other. Yeah, um, okay, so good. So
your your goats fared very well. I'm glad to hear that.
I remember the ghasts at my birthday party. They one
of them was a housecoat remember, oh yeah, house goat. Um.
(16:32):
So there was an actual reason that feigning goats were
bred initially, and it wasn't for kicks. The Tennessee farmers
of the eighteen eighties. Actually we're a little more soulful
than the ones today, And it wasn't funny back then.
Somebody right, right, yeah, I don't laugh at that. I
(16:53):
can't say it. I just had like eighty great jokes.
S are you talking about the protection of the herd?
Not yet? Okay. So the goats become an established breed
of their own by the nineteen fifties, and about that
time they started to leave Tennessee. I think for Texas
was the next place that they really spread out. But
it wasn't until the nineteen eighties that the the goats
(17:15):
were really diverged into two not necessarily two different breeds
because they haven't separated yet. But there's one line that's
generally bred for meat, like the original version, and the
other line is bred as a novelty, and they tend
to be smaller and just faint like that, yes, longer, yeah,
(17:36):
because if you just kind of leave it alone. Um,
the the myotonia is worse as a younger worse early
in life. Yeah, they get kind of used to it
sometimes more they adapt to it. They're not as scared
later in life. So yeah, younger goat is more prone
to fall over, exactly so. But I think if you
(17:56):
compare an adult, um fainting goat bread in that line
to be a novelty to a goat that was bred
for its meat of the same age, the novelty goats
can probably fall over at the drop of a hat,
still right, right, because farmer thinks that's funny. Well, the
other reason that that Robert says they can't find much
(18:16):
evidence of this anymore, but I guess back in the
day they would, and this sort of makes sense, they
would they would add some of these fainting goats to
their herd of regular goats in case there were predators around.
A pack of wolves come up, scares the little pebbly
dodo out of these goats, and then the stiff goats
fall over and get eaten while the other ones take
(18:39):
off and run. So it essentially it's almost like they're
not bait. But uh, you know, a much easier kill
keep the wolves occupied, so the rest of them can escape.
You know what they are, what sacrificial lamb? Yeah, you're right,
that's exactly what they are. But there's no evidence that
that's really the reason that they're breeding them. No, and
(19:00):
there's apparently not much evidence that or how how much
that was used, as I think it could have just
been a good idea, right, Yeah, so Chuck, the idea
of like make no, no, no mistake. My antonia is
a um it's a deficiency, a disorder, not a desirable trait.
So the idea of taking because it's an undesirable trait
(19:25):
under natural selection, it shouldn't exist, right, because if you
take a fainting goat out in nature, like you said,
along with the herd of sheep or other goats or whatever,
now they'll they'll be the first eaten and then they
won't have a chance to reproduce eventually, and it'll that
trade to die out. But then being um bred for
(19:45):
that for an undesirable trait and then protected by humans,
whether by a fence or you know, like it, he'll
be with he'll a billy with the shotgun or whatever.
That's called unnatural selection, right, nothing natural about it? No,
or artificial selection is another way to put it. And
anytime something like that happens, there's gonna be some people,
probably in an organization called Peter, that might stand up
(20:07):
and say, I don't know if this is such a
cool thing for humans to do. And Peter, as expected,
isn't the biggest fan of raising feigning goats. Humane society
isn't so worried about it. Um they say there's a
lot more breeding issues in the world that we should
be more concerned about. And neither one of them have
an official stance. But no, the woman from Peter that
(20:29):
Robert interviewed in this article sounded like she hadn't heard
of feigning goats until he called her. Yeah, that's the
impression I got. Oh yeah, the quote is a little vague,
isn't it. Yeah, yeah, she just like the standard Peter quote,
just plug in the animal. Well, who knows. There is
no official stance though, so maybe maybe Robert alerted her
to this whole phenomena. But they have an official stance
(20:51):
now and it stopped breeding feigning goats. It's a little
late for that, though. It's a recognized and um prized
as a separate American breed of goat. There's about three
thousand to five thousand of them running around and then
falling over right, um, and they don't look like they're
going anywhere. UM. The Livestock Conservancy, I think is what
it's called. UM suggests that this uh, this breed of
(21:14):
goat be very much UM protected and taken care of
and conserved. Is I guess the best word to use.
Did I tell you about Emily and the little baby
goat at the winery at the winery and Athens. No,
we went to uh right before this l a trip.
You know, we went over to Santa Barbara for one
country and we went in this one winery and as
(21:34):
we were going in, there was a guy with a
dog outside, and you know, of course we attacked this
dog and repetting it. He said, yeah, they wouldn't let
it in because they got a goat, a baby goat
in there. So Emily here's this, of course, and it's
just like in the inside saying where's the goat? Where's
the goat? This lady has a probably about a six
week old kid in her arms, wrapped in a blanket.
(21:55):
That's um has some sort of physical ailment, not feigning
goats in Rome. It was part human, part human. It
had human hands. Um no, but she had this little
baby kid and uh, you know, Emily goes over and
starts drooling, and the lady says, do you want to
hold it? And in less than a second the goat
swap had been made, and you know, for the next
twenty minutes, this goat is literally like nuzzling Emily in
(22:17):
the neck. And I took about twenty pictures of the
range of emotions on Emily's face at all. There wasn't crying,
it was just it was a type of ecstasy that
you rarely see in an adult human female. Very cute.
You're like a long story short. We own that goat now? Yes, yeah, no,
not true. My aunt used to have a pigmy goat
in California along the Russian River. Did they not get big?
(22:39):
I guess hence the I would say a pigmy fainting
goat would be about the cutest combination, especially one that
like asked to shine your shoes with like big Those kids,
so man, I can't watch that. Yeah, it looks it
just doesn't look right. It's awesome. I think kids they
don't look like they're hurt. They don't look injured. They
(23:00):
just look surprised every time. And then fine, well, kittens
look surprised with everything. They just they have that constant
look at surprise. Anything else. No, we've touched on the
satanic nature of goats, meat goats, fainting goats, fainting kittens,
unnatural selection tennessee, uh, Texas the nineteenth century. And that's
(23:24):
about it, right, Emily's a natural love of animals, my
iconic jerks. Yeah, everything's right on. Uh. And now you know,
when you see these videos and you show your buddies,
you can now tell people exactly what's going on. Say,
they're not fainting at all. Actually, yeah, stupid. So if
you want to learn more about fainting goats, remember go
(23:46):
to YouTube why are you tube dot com and type
in fainting goats and then fainting goat kittens. It doesn't
really make sense. It could just be fainting kittens, but
still um and you'll see some hilarity. You can also
learn more about feigning goats in a very well written
and well research article by Robert Lamb with stuff to
Blow your mind How fainting goats work. Type that into
(24:09):
the handy search bar and how stuff works dot com
And now we'll bring that up, and that means I
just brought up listener, Matt. That's right, Josh, I'm gonna
call this a real c s I. Dude. This is
from ED in Chico, California. Hey, Josh and Chuck and Jerry.
I'm a crime scene investigator for a municipal police department
(24:30):
in rural northern California. Being a c s I is
just one of my collateral assignments. I'm also an evidence
technician and have a couple of other titles depending on
who has given me orders that day. Nearly every agency
in my area has trained cops or civilians to be
a c s I when needed, not as a standalone assignment,
so that kind of answers one of the questions we had.
(24:51):
I showed interest in being a c s I when
I started my evidence assignment four years ago and was
sent to Basic c s High School and later Advanced
c s I Crime Scene Reconstruction School. He's skipped right
over intermediate yeah, I guess. And finally, blood spatter analysis.
We also do monthly in house training on topics like photography, trajectories,
(25:13):
DNA collection, buried body excavation, et cetera. Our c s
I or jacks of all trades since our agencies are
too small to be able to afford specialized positions. Your
show was very well researched and had all the highlights
of blood spatter and forensic photography. And as a sidebar,
while we do have two big, expensive two thou do
(25:34):
sl our cameras, we really only use them for the
most specialized photos like nighttime crime scenes. Of time they
use a point and shoot from Walmart. Really, yeah, I
could see that though, I mean like that. The technology
has gotten good enough so that I'm sure I know,
but it would just seem weird if you saw dexter
like walk up a little point and shoot. Yea. And
(25:56):
plus I think if you were the family of like
a murder victim and you saw some guy walk and
point to be like, are you even supposed to be?
How about a real camera? Yeah about a little respect.
You mentioned blood voids at a crime scene. We call
them blood shadows. Oh, I like them one to enjoy
being a c s I. But like Josh said, ages Ago,
(26:17):
television ain't nothing like reality. I can't stand watching those shows.
They're drive me crazy, but they're not based in reality.
Writing in reality, DNA evidence takes one to two months
and latent prints can take four or five months, not
four to six minutes. Yeah. And the other thing is
is like everybody is just this jack of all trades, like, oh,
I got these prints off of this scene, and I'm
(26:39):
going to go analyze them, and I'm going to go
like shake down the bad guys. You know, it's like
spend more money on an ensemble. Will you? Thank you?
Ed from Chico. Oh that was it. Yeah, sorry to
end your letter with a rant from me. Thank you
very much for your illuminating letter. We appreciate it. We
(27:01):
want to hear from you. First of all, you can
go um check us out on Facebook, Facebook, dot com,
slash stuff you should know. You can follow us on Twitter,
s y s K podcast, and you can join our
QB team k I v A dot org slash Team
slash Stuff you should Know. You can also always email us,
and specifically, if you have ever tampered with natural selection
(27:24):
through artificial selection, we want to hear about it. Send
us an email about this, all right, Chuck, that's right.
That's stuff podcast at how stuff works dot com for
more on this and thousands of other topics. Is it
how stuff works dot Com. Want more how stuff works,
(27:45):
check out our blogs on the house. Stuff works dot
Com home page brought to you by the reinvented two
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