GoatMan

  I ask Dr. McElligott about goat cleverness but phrase my question in a way that clearly gets his goat.3

  “Are goats as intelligent as, say, a three-year-old child?”

  “Arggggh!” Dr. McElligott is almost squirming in annoyance at my question.

  “I hate those comparisons. I saw a headline: ‘New Caledonian Crows Are as Clever as Seven-Year-Olds.’ Hmmm, yeah…They did some cognitive testing with them and applied the same tests to children, and children have to be seven years old before they start getting the tests right. But nevertheless, you don’t know what’s going on: the behaviour may appear very similar, but you don’t know what’s going on in their brains. But really why it annoys me so much is because I think the animal should be interesting in its own right, not just because it can beat a seven-year-old. Because the opposite of that argument is: If an animal is not as intelligent as a seven-year-old, is that animal worth less? Should we be able to treat it badly, or at least not treat it as well as we could? Has it less value? I think, No!”4

  As I’m getting up to leave Dr. McElligott in peace, he asks the question that I’d been fearing and purposely ignoring due to the unsavoury implications: “Hang on. I didn’t ask, but I assume you’re going to be a male goat? Because there are key sex differences…”

  My sex as a goat and my sexuality as a goat are questions I have just not wanted to think about. I guess I thought it was implicit in my funding application that I was going to remain male when I became an elephant because I’d nowhere said, “I want to be a transgender elephant.” Transgender and trans-species? Well, I think that might be attempting to explore too many issues at once.

  But sex is obviously a big part of animal life. From the Darwinian perspective, sex is the whole point of animal life (though for us individual animals, that’s pretty irrelevant: no one has sex out of an obligation to their deoxyribonucleic acid, right?).

  However, I’m not sure I’m ready to go “all the way” for this project. I am sure my girlfriend would be extremely upset if she were cuckolded by a goat. This having-sex-with-a-goat thought opens up a whole can of worms, the eating of which would, in my opinion, be greatly preferable to the aforementioned act, if one were forced to choose. Honestly, gentle reader, this project has not been some terrific ruse to justify interspecies “canoodling.” Of course, from an artistic point of view, that level of commitment would add a lot. Certain of the more avant-garde galleries in Berlin would, I’m sure, be much more interested in showing that kind of work. It would also help the project reach a wide and diverse audience (a big tick as far as the Wellcome Trust is concerned), in that it would stir up an immense media furor: “Largest Biomedical Research Charity in the World Funds Designer to Have Sex with Goat.” I, for one, would read an article with that headline. I’m less keen for the subject of the article to be me, however. It would be quite telling if I were to find myself on trial for one count of gross indecency, one count of bestiality, one count of misuse of charity funds, etc. In fact, that legal question and its defence gets to the heart of the project. Because if I need to stand up in court to defend my actions of having had, um, “carnal relations” with a goat, it will mean—in a way—I will have succeeded in my project beyond my wildest hopes. Because I will only have had sex with a goat if I wanted to have sex with a goat, and I will only have wanted to have sex with a goat if I have managed to adopt the mindset of a goat to the extent that I have developed the deep goat instinct to seek out and mate with other goats.

  I obviously want the project to be as successful as possible, so…Oh, dear. Is that really what I’m heading for here? As a human, I don’t want to have “relations” with a goat. But what if I manage to be a goat so well that I do? This is a conundrum: wanting to be a goat necessarily implies wanting to have sex with other goats; hence the success of my project would be resoundingly demonstrated if such an act were to take place. How did I get myself into such a philosophical interspecies love tangle?

  Luckily, nature and Dr. McElligott present a way out. Goats live in groups strictly segregated by sex, only coming together for the rut when the female goats are brought into estrus. In fact, it’s thought that it’s the smell of the male goats that does it, and male goats make a great effort to direct their pee onto their own goaty beards in order to increase the force of the smell they carry and thus make themselves more attractive to the females. That means that even if I succeed in becoming goat-me to such an extent that I want to have sex with another of my own species, I will only be able to do so at a certain time of year. In our climate, the rut is around August. So as long as I leave it until after then to take up life as a goat, I shouldn’t have to get involved in lovemaking with anything/one. I want to give the rut as wide a berth as possible, but I also need to make an Alpine crossing to satisfy the conditions of my grant. The weather in the Alps is not at all friendly in the winter months, the winter beginning in earnest by October. I appear to have quite a narrow window of opportunity, bracketed by avoiding any possibility of conjugal relations with she-goats and not dying atop a mountain during a fatal change of weather.

  Pan having his wicked way with a goat. This statue was found in the ruins of the Roman town of Herculaneum, which, like Pompeii, was buried under metres of ash from the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in AD 79: further evidence that humans have been thinking about all this stuff for a very long time.

  How best to transform my mind into the mind of a goat? Well, we already must have a lot in common. I mean, if life on Earth began 3.8 billion years ago and the last common ancestor of goats and humans lived only about five million years ago, we share the vast majority of our evolutionary history. To me, this suggests that deep down there’s an inner goat in all of us. Like goats, we were once wild animals. Up until just ten thousand years ago, humans wandered the landscape as hunter-gatherers, living in small tribes of about one hundred fifty individuals—herds, if you will. In terms of evolution, it’s a blink of an eye since we began living in vast cities, sitting on chairs, with access to sweet and fatty foods throughout the year that we don’t even have to chase in order to gorge ourselves on. Goats have accompanied us in our transition from wild hunter-gatherer. One species of goat is now domesticated, and, interestingly, a good argument can be made that we’ve been domesticated, too.

  Nine species make up the genus Capra (as in Capricorn). Eight of these live wild, with ranges across North Africa, Europe, and Asia Minor, including the majestic Alpine ibex, which roams high in the European Alps (the Rocky Mountain “goat” of North America technically isn’t a goat). The bezoar goat, which is still found in the mountains from Turkey to Pakistan, is the species that gradually was turned into the common domestic farm goat and has since been transported across the world by humans.

  Our close relationship with goats began in about 9000 BCE in a place known as the Fertile Crescent. This area around the foothills of the Zagros Mountains, where Africa meets the continent of Eurasia, is where tribes of our hunter-gatherer ancestors first stopped roaming around hunting and gathering, settled down, and took to planting and tending instead. It’s the cradle of agricultural civilisation.

  Interspecies nursing.

  These earliest farmers must have decided that rather than trying to creep up on these constantly on edge and frustratingly nimble creatures so as to get close enough to kill them, they could save themselves a whole lot of bother by keeping a few captive somehow. And even better, if they kept at least one of the pesky male ones about, their stock would replenish itself just by letting nature take its course. Thus the bezoar goat was the first animal we domesticated as livestock (some enterprising wolves had become man’s best friend thousands of years before). As well as goat meat, as a bonus we got the goat milk to feed to our kids and make into goat cheese to eat as adults. Processing the milk into cheese was necessary before it could be consumed by adults because processing greatly reduces the amount of lactose present; it was another few thousand years before the genetic mutation occ
urred that caused the digestive enzyme that breaks down the lactose in milk to persist into adulthood. The human is the only animal that doesn’t stop drinking milk once it’s weaned, just swapping from human mother’s milk to that from alternative species. And it’s only about 35 percent of humans, mostly hailing from northern Europe, that can even indulge in this odd behaviour without becoming rather ill.

  As today’s farmers do, the first farmers slaughtered most of the juvenile males (archaeologists have found piles of male goat bones) because only one billy goat is needed to replenish the stock and you can’t make cheese from male goats. They probably kept the least troublesome males, that is, the ones that showed the least aggression and fear towards humans. And so, over the generations, these captive wild bezoar goats gradually became genetically less afraid of humans and less aggressive. For some reason, becoming tamer as a species is associated with a suite of other changes, too. Not all of these changes apply to all species, but generally horns and teeth get smaller, builds get less stocky, faces get flatter, ears tend to go floppy, and adults retain more juvenile behaviour: more play, more homosexuality, and greater tolerance of other individuals. Additionally, and in all species, domestication has been associated with a shrinking brain. Dogs have smaller brains than wolves, common goats have smaller brains than bezoar goats, and pigs have smaller brains than wild boars. And, interestingly, over the last thirty thousand years, human brains have been shrinking, too. In fact, the people responsible for carving the Lion Human of Hohlenstein-Stadel had an extra tennis ball’s worth of brain compared with us. They were also stockier in their build and had larger teeth and more prominent, muzzlelike jaws.

  This pattern leads to the intriguing idea that humans have also been undergoing a process of domestication, a selection to become less aggressive. Only we’ve domesticated ourselves. How might this process of self-domestication have happened? As related by Harvard professor of biological anthropology Richard Wrangham, it could have gone like this: if someone (it’s pretty much going to be an angry young man) keeps disrupting the group because of his violent temper, well, the rest of the group might get together and decide enough is enough and that they need to do something about said young man. So that something happens: the rest of the group collude and bash him on the head with a handy rock or push him off a handy cliff or stick him with a handy spear. Rough justice, but problem solved.

  So just as our ancestors likely selected out the most aggressive and difficult bezoar goat males for the chop, a similar selection could have been occurring over the past thirty thousand years of human society. Certainly capital punishment has been a big part of human society, probably for as long as human society has existed. One of the oldest known systems of justice, the Code of Hammurabi, which was literally written in stone nearly four thousand years ago, metes out capital punishment for all sorts of crimes. And studies of peoples who live in hunter-gatherer tribes in New Guinea today find capital punishment is the cause of death of over 15 percent of males in the group. So if the troublemakers are weeded out early, before they’ve had time to have many children, well, gradually, so the theory goes, the genes that tend to make someone aggressive and quick to anger don’t get reproduced as much in the population.

  So cold-blooded, premeditated aggression, like deciding to cooperate on getting rid of a troublemaker, is responsible for a gradually diminishing tendency in our species to jump to hot-blooded, angry, reactionary aggression, which has led to our self-domestication. And, as with other species, this caused our body builds to become less stocky, our faces to flatten, our brains to shrink, and our behaviour to remain more juvenile, so even as adults we’re curious, can learn new things, and generally can be more tolerant of the behaviour of others, even in a crowded tube carriage.

  Today’s smaller brains could be caused by our self-domestication, or they could be evidence that we’re just dumber as a species than we used to be. If the latter, then one theory as to why our brains are shrinking and we’re dumbing down is simply because our lives are less dependent on being clever; the environmental pressures selecting for intelligence have lessened. The reasoning goes that as our societies have grown, people who wouldn’t quite have had the brains to survive and have children in the past manage to scrape by on the margin of the group. We’re not talking about some sort of prehistoric National Health Service, just that over time people’s survival has depended less and less on their own wits.

  But which theory is right? Well, considering the timescales involved, there’s no direct way of knowing if we’re getting dumber or if we’re getting domesticated (until some enterprising/mad scientist/evil genius has a go at creating a prehistoric human from ancient DNA). But there is some evidence that we’re gettin’ stupid. Reaction times correlate somewhat with intelligence. In the 1880s, Francis Galton, an early eugenics advocate working at University College London, measured reaction times of over three thousand of his fellow Victorians. Comparing these measurements to modern results shows our average reaction times are slower, to the tune of 250 milliseconds for men and 277 milliseconds for women. The scientist who made the comparison calculates that the difference corresponds to an underlying decline of 13.35 IQ points since Victorian times.

  But there’s also evidence from IQ tests that suggests we’re getting cleverer. Any IQ test, before it’s made available to be used, will have been standardised. The prospective IQ test is taken by a representative sample of the population that the test is aimed at, and then it’s adjusted so that the average score that will be achieved by members of that population will be 100. Professor James Flynn, a psychologist at the University of Otago, noticed that when people today take a test that has been standardised for the population of a few years ago, their average score is greater than 100. That is, when an “average person” today takes a test from, say, 1996, they’ll get a slightly better than average score on the old test. The effect is consistent across populations and works out to an average improvement of about three IQ points per decade.

  Many explanations have been offered to explain this general rise in IQ, such as improved childhood nutrition, but Flynn argues that the “Flynn effect” is down to people getting more used to the kind of thinking that the tests measure. In his book What Is Intelligence?, he references some interviews done by a Soviet psychologist, Alexander Luria, who travelled to remote ares of Siberia early in the twentieth century to interview the people there. He asked the kinds of questions on IQ tests, for example: “All bears are white where there is always snow; in Novaya Zemlya there is always snow; what colour are the bears there?” Errrm, white, obviously. But the correct answer was not obvious to the preliterate hunting peoples Luria was talking to. For example: “I have only seen black bears, and I do not talk of what I have not seen.” Even when verbally prodded towards the correct answer, his interviewees (who tended to be the chief men of the tribe, so certainly not dunces) would insistently reply with answers like “Such a thing is not to be settled by words, but by testimony. If a wise man came to us from Novaya Zemlya and testified that bears were white, we might believe him.”

  I’m not sure if Luria interviewed any Yukaghirs on his trip through Siberia, but the sorts of responses he got demonstrate a different view of what’s important and how the world works to the view implicit in IQ tests. Learning to read (and getting an education) doesn’t just open up the range of things we think about, but fundamentally alters how we think, in ways that aren’t necessarily obvious to us.

  So thicker or more docile, or even thicker and more docile? As with anything that concerns human intelligence, especially whether it’s going up or going down, the matter remains the subject of some debate. But regarding the intelligence of domestic animals verses their wild counterparts, it turns out that big-brained, wild wolves are only better than their domesticated, small-brained cousins, dogs, at solving some types of puzzles. Wolves excel at things like finding routes out of mazes and getting food out of boxes, whereas dogs trump them on puzzles
that require understanding social cues. Perhaps something similar has happened with us and with goats: our brains may have shrunk, but the focus of our intelligence has shifted rather than diminished.

  Whether we are in fact both domesticated or not, goat behaviour and human behaviour necessarily share similar roots. If we widen out to animals in general, it becomes quite difficult to pin down what separates us from them. There is a long and unesteemed history of people pronouncing that X is what separates humans from animals—tool use, agriculture, large-scale cooperation, laughter, grief—only for an example of nonhumans doing X to turn up. Ants farm aphids, bees cooperate, rats laugh when tickled, elephants grieve. As for tool use, in the early 1960s a young Jane Goodall was the first scientist to observe chimps in the wild stripping the leaves off sticks and using the sticks to fish for termites. Interestingly, Liberia’s five-cent stamp from 1906 features an illustration of a chimp fishing for termites with a twig, a reminder that just because it’s not yet been scientifically observed doesn’t mean it isn’t already out there: we don’t know everything about our world, and new discoveries come along and change what we think we know. Since the 1960s chimps have been documented using all sorts of tools in the wild, as well as passing their knowledge on to the younger generation and so even transmitting culture, but up until Goodall’s observations, anthropologists saw toolmaking as mankind’s defining trait. Upon reading her report, her mentor Louis Leakey responded: “Now we must redefine ‘tool,’ redefine ‘man,’ or accept chimpanzees as humans.”

  A chimpanzee using a tool to fish for termites on a Liberian stamp from 1906.

  It looks like we resorted to redefining man, as, despite the best efforts of the Nonhuman Rights Project (NhRP), our nearest extant species are still not legally defined as persons. That may change: lawyers for the NhRP were recently granted an Order to Show Cause under the habeas corpus statute on behalf of two chimpanzees, Hercules and Leo, captive at Stony Brook University in New York. Habeas corpus, meaning “you shall have the body (in court),” is an eight-hundred-year-old legal instrument that requires those holding someone captive to bring that person to court and present proof they have lawful grounds to keep their prisoner from their liberty. The fact that the court issued an Order to Show Cause means the university had to prove its authority to keep the chimps captive. The case was heard by Justice Barbara Jaffe in New York, and the testimony presented was based not only on scientific evidence, but included citations of test cases from the era of slavery and cases where psychiatric patients have been held against their will.