A British man who lived in the Alps as a goat has won one of this year’s Ig Nobel prizes for his scientific research.
Thomas Thwaites designed prosthetic limbs that allowed him to walk on all fours and graze with goats on a farm in the Alps. Thomas got tired of all the worry and the pain of being a human and decided to take a holiday from it all and become a goat.
In his book (GoatMan: How I Took a Holiday from Being Human) he writes, “”I was walking with the dog of a friend and I noticed that the dog just seemed really happy about life, without any worries, and I thought to myself it would be really great to be you for a day.”
“I tried to become a goat to escape the angst inherent in being a human. The project became an exploration of how close modern technology can take us to fulfilling an ancient human dream: to take on characteristics from other animals. But instead of the ferocity of a bear, or the perspective of a bird, the characteristic most useful in modern life is something else; being present in the moment perhaps.”
“Anyway I ended up in the Alps, on four legs, at a goat farm, with a prosthetic rumen strapped to my chest, eating grass, and becoming a goat.”
“I could then strap this bag to my torso and spit chewed up grass into one opening and suck the cultured microbes and volatile fatty acids out another opening like a milkshake, so I can digest them in my true stomach and live off grass in the Alps like a goat,” he said.
That was the plan, at least. However, after being warned by experts that this could seriously harm his health, he ended up heating the grass in a pressure cooker first.
“I suffered quite a lot as a goat, because of the slope I was constantly falling over, and of course I had to eat grass,”
“The goats didn’t seem to like me very much, sometimes I thought they were really going to try and attack me. And they have particularly dangerous horns. But I later realized that they were just letting me know there was a hierarchy, and I should know my place.”
He said the best moment “was when one of the goats suddenly decided she was going to be my friend, and she just followed me everywhere”.
Settling on the idea of living as a goat, Mr Thwaites applied for a university grant to study goat psychology and prepared for life with a goatherd in the village of Wolfenschiessen in Switzerland.
He got prosthetic “goat legs” from a clinic in Manchester as well as a specially designed fake goat’s stomach, which would digest the grass before it reached his real stomach.
The Ig Nobel Prizes are parodies of the Nobel Prizes with the aim to “honor achievements that first make people laugh, and then make them think” and are given out every year for 10 unusual or trivial achievements in scientific research.
