GoatMan

However, once again, getting into the thing was a somewhat terrifying experience. Although the total lack of joints meant that technically I could relax my muscles as the exoskeleton supported my weight, in practice my muscles remained very much clenched, because hanging facedown from two springs that amplified the slightest shift in my weight gave me the feeling of always being just about to topple over sideways (and again, I’d thoughtfully included a few sharp protrusions during the making process). While this prototype was springy in the extreme, control had become an issue; the fact that the springy legs had no joints made it rather difficult to move the feet, in particular to move them quickly out to the side to prevent myself toppling over sideways. Which is exactly what happened after I managed to take one step.

  Prototype Number 1: wood, steel rod, elastic bands, cardboard tube, found objects.

  Still, one small step is not to be sniffed at; indeed in some contexts it’s considered quite an achievement. I decided to remedy Prototype Number 2’s number-one defect—lack of joints—by cutting its front legs off and sticking them back on backwards. The legs kept on dislocating from their new ball-and-socket shoulder joints, however, so I stapled on some ligaments made from boxer-short elastic.

  I’d started to feel a bit like God, handing out legs and joints and ligaments to my creation as I saw fit. However, unlike God, I’m lacking somewhat in the omniscience department.

  Nonetheless, the addition of shoulder joints to the second prototype enabled the taking of not just one but many steps. I was even able to walk up to the end of my flat. And turn around. And walk back again. However, this feat was not accomplished without a lot of grunting and panting from me and squeaking and groaning from my springy wooden body. After I’d taken possibly seventy or eighty steps, their toll was taken, and I broke one of my back legs. Once more I found myself sprawled in a heap of flesh and wood and bruised bone.

  With these attempts in mind, I decide it’s time to consult an expert. I make an approach to God, but there’s no answer, so I go to someone who studies his designs: Professor John Hutchinson of the Royal Veterinary College’s Structure and Motion Laboratory.

  After submitting to the usual pestering via email, Professor Hutchinson kindly agrees to meet me at the campus in Hertfordshire when he gets back from studying some “weird, weird new dinosaur fossils” and “a colony of a million penguins” in Argentina. That sounds like a pretty fun work trip.

  Prototype Number 2b: wood, glue, plastic sheet, steel, Velcro, elastic, cable ties, ice skates.

  The RVC campus is “basically a farm with a bunch of animal hospitals and a biomechanics laboratory,” he says when I meet him just after he’s attended to the Princess Royal (the horsey one), as she unveiled (yet another) statue of a horse. Like Dr. Devlin, he’s American (or Canadian, failing to judge by his accent), very busy, and an exceptionally nice guy, willing to indulge a stranger with a goat fetish.

  When we’re settled among the walls of books and boxes of bones of Professor Hutchinson’s office, overlooked by a life-size cutout of Charles Darwin, he asks why I want to be a goat. I trot out my well-worn answer that I was upset at being a human so thought I’d become an elephant, but then was told by a shaman that I was much more of a goat, and so on and so forth.

  “You started as an elephant? Ah, I would’ve really been your guy for elephants.”

  Damn! It turns out that (slightly embarrassingly) I’m consulting with perhaps the world’s greatest specialist in elephant locomotion about no-longer-elephant-but-goat locomotion. But Professor Hutchinson reassures me that though his first love is elephants (along with dinosaurs), he’s interested in the locomotion of other animals, too.

  The starting point of our conversation is the many homologous structures in the animal kingdom, the bits of anatomy that even very different species share. So although a bird flies and a fish swims, a monkey swings, and a goat gallops, there are striking similarities in the structure and arrangement of the bones of all of their forelimbs. This was one of the lines of evidence that Darwin used to argue that animals were not put on the Earth fully formed by a designer, but rather that we all evolved from a common ancestor.

  Diagrams like the one opposite illustrate Darwin’s thinking, but to persons in my current state of mind, they also suggest the tantalising prospect of being able to gallop like a goat with just a few small modifications to my personal anatomy. I make my argument to Professor Hutchinson: “So with all these homologous structures between us and goats, surely it shouldn’t be that difficult to make something that you can be comfortable galloping around in, right?”

  Prof. John Hutchinson.

  Homologous structures in the limbs of goat and man.

  “Ooooh.” He considers his response. “Sure. But you look at a mouse, and they’ve got a lot of common features as well. So let’s say one of the fundamental things about mice is their ability to scurry along behind skirting boards. With all these homologous structures between a man and a mouse, it shouldn’t be too difficult to adjust one’s anatomy so that we could scurry along behind skirting boards, right?”

  Hmmm. Yes, I suppose if Annette had seen the mouse in me, it’s difficult to see how I could have adapted my anatomy so I could live behind the skirting boards (in constant terror of death by Janet), even despite mice and men’s similar forearm bone structure, due to this fundamental characteristic that is different: size. The professor goes on to describe the various categories of animal, moving back through humans’ entire evolutionary history all the way to the amphibians and fishes.

  “You see, there are common features all the way back. But there are also things that are radically different.”

  Ahhhh. What I think Professor Hutchinson means is that if I’m arguing that having anatomy in common with another species means we should be able to make prostheses that account for any differences and thus become like that species, well, then, why just goats? Pick any creature and I would find homologous structures on which to base my conjecture that with a bit of engineering, I could adapt myself to become that creature. The same reasoning should apply to bats, for instance: hang upside down and swoop around living off insects I catch in my mouth using only sonar? Surely I should be able to make an exoskeleton that lets me do that, since both bats and us humans have a similar arrangement of bones in our limbs, and we’ve both got lungs and a larynx and a mouth and ears?

  So as well as all the benefits of shared anatomy from a shared evolutionary history, each species has an evolutionary history that made it unique. He tells me: “You’re coming along with a lot of baggage from your evolutionary history, and you can’t reconfigure that. There’s so much of us that is totally hardwired and can’t be changed. We’ve evolved so much to be bipeds, big-brained and short-armed.”

  “But, but, but—”

  In my video of our conversation, at this point, with my conviction I can become a goat in danger of being refuted, I seem to have become quite exercised and thought it appropriate to resort to half-crawling round the office to demonstrate to the professor “just how close I am to being a goat” and how I just need to “make up for the deficiencies in my goat anatomy.” Professor Hutchinson looks slightly uncomfortable at being witness to this rather bizarre display, and reviewing the recording in the cool light of another day, I am slightly embarrassed myself. But at the time it seemed liked the only way of countering his argument and keeping my dream alive.

  “Hmmm,” he says, considering my demonstration. Then, apropos of nothing, he exclaims, “Sure!” as though gamely deciding that if this is some kind of setup, he’ll play along anyway. In any case, the grown man braying on all fours doesn’t seem inclined to accept reasoned argument.

  “OK, then. Well, in mechanical terms, you’ve got the problem that your forelimbs are shorter than your hind limbs. You need to be extending your forelimbs a bit to get your back more horizontal.”

  Exactly. These academics can be so slow sometimes.

  “We’re primates, and primat
es are weird. We normally put all our weight on our hind limbs, and even a gorilla puts a lot of weight back there. To be more goatlike, you’ve got to figure out a way to walk with more weight on your front limbs—about 60 percent of your weight on your front limbs and 40 percent on your hind legs.”

  I weigh 67 kilograms (148 pounds), 60 percent of which is 40 kilograms (88 pounds). That’s twenty bags of sugar held up by each arm, all the time. I’m going to have to buff the hell up.

  “Goats are up on their fingernails and toenails. At the front they have elongated this part,” he explains, motioning to the palm of his hand, “where their metacarpals are fused.”

  So the joint that looks like it’s where the knee should be in a goat’s or a horse’s back legs is actually its ankle. This leads to the common misconception that the legs of a horse “bend the wrong way.” They don’t, because what look like its knee joints are really its ankle joints, so it’s as though it’s walking around on tiptoes. (And it’s not that common a misconception, because people enjoy pointing this out so much.)

  “They can wiggle their toes a bit, but they’re pretty stiff. A goat’s got two toes that allow some side-to-side flexibility, whereas a horse has only got one, so it’s even more limited.”

  “So they’re cloven-hoofed, which means you can eat them. As the Good Book tells us: ‘Among the animals, whatever divides the hoof, having cloven hooves and chewing the cud; that you may eat (Leviticus 11:3).’” (I don’t directly quote the Bible to the professor, because I don’t actually know the Bible by heart.)

  “Yes, well. And whereas we as humans have a lot of our control spread all the way down our limbs, especially in our legs, in goats all the control and muscle in the animal is up top, with just elongated springiness down low.”

  “Yeah, goats do have little pinny legs.”

  “Exactly. And the advantage of that is it gives you a light limb, and it’s easier to swing a light limb. Imagine trying to run with 5 kilogram weights. It’s a lot harder to have them stuck on your feet compared to having them on your hips. So goats have everything tapered below their elbows and knees for the same reason, lengthening and lightening.”

  “So…could a goat run faster than a person?” I ask innocently. I know the answer, but I’m building up to broaching the subject of the gallop, and he’s already a little exasperated.

  “Oh, yes, definitely.”

  “Is that just because they’ve got four legs, or is it more complicated than that?”

  “More complicated.”

  It’s always more complicated.

  “The legs are part of it, but the back plays a big role, too. When they go airborne in a gallop, they’ll be flexing and then extending their back to be lengthening their strides.”

  “Well, my dream is to gallop.”

  “A gallop? Oh, boy, a gallop would be very, very hard…”

  At this point, once again, I’m up out of my chair, and this time sort of manically bowing to demonstrate that I, too, have a flexible back.

  “OK, yeah, that’s your lumbar—the same muscles that would be powering the back of a goat—but yours are weak compared to a goat or other four-legged mammal. Besides that, a gallop would be very, very tough on your body because you’ve got to get airborne to do a gallop, which means the forces on your legs get higher and the stresses on your tissues get higher. Not to mention you’ll just get tired out extremely quickly.”

  Apart from the mechanical issues, Professor Hutchinson also doubts my mental ability: “The sequence of limbs hitting the ground, the classic coconut-shell Monty Python rhythm, I think is just kind of alien to our brains.”

  Once again I get the distinct impression that I don’t know enough to know how impossible what I’m asking is. Professor Hutchinson is trying to tell me.

  “A gallop…It’d be amazing. But it’s not going to happen, though. Put it this way: I think you’d find walking and trotting much more…‘comfortable.’”

  Professor Hutchinson takes me on a tour around the campus, which resonates with the squawks of guinea fowl. I ask why they have so many guinea fowl.

  “Guinea fowl” he says, “love to run.”

  He takes me to the biomechanics lab, where they’ve built a special treadmill with a screen for doing guinea fowl virtual-reality experiments. There’s another treadmill, this one tiny, for running experiments with hamsters, and a set of big cat collars being packed with sensors before being shipped to Africa, where they’ll be worn around the necks of a pride of lions. He also shows me their latest gadget, an amazing x-ray video camera, which, he says, is “revolutionising the field.” It lets you watch in slow motion what’s happening inside an animal as it moves.

  “Like in the sick bay in Star Trek,” I say.

  “You’d need a very good reason to put a human through this, though, as it takes 250 x-rays a second.”

  Outside, next to the lab building and tucked in an out-of-the-way corner of the yard, is a suspiciously innocuous shipping container. The professor gets a big bunch of keys with a horseshoe key ring (an actual horseshoe) and unlocks it, swinging open the heavy steel doors. Inside, the container is piled high with plastic sacks containing frozen body parts. There are sacks containing horses’ heads and one containing a whole tiger; further in are some ostrich necks, loads of giraffe feet, “eleven frozen penguins, some alpacas, a leopard, a bunch of crocodiles, and lots of bits of rhinos.”

  Whatsinjohnsfreezer.com: Prof. Hutchinson’s excellent blog. What is in John’s freezer?

  Hundreds of dead animals! (Can you spot the penguin?)

  Just by the entrance are some elephant legs, bloody stumps sticking out the tops of their sacks. “We’ve got thirty to forty of those. Whenever an elephant dies, I tend to get sent its feet.”

  Sigh.

  Life will have to take some fairly odd turns if I’m ever to see inside a shipping container with stranger contents. Professor Hutchinson closes up his freezer, and I follow him across the yard and into a building through some double-height doors, following the trackway of a gantry crane overhead. We emerge into a large, bright room, and in the middle, hanging upside down from the crane’s hoist, suspended from a hook through one of its back legs, is a massive horse. Professor Hutchinson tells me that the hook pierces the leg at the Achilles tendon because that structure can take the whole weight of the animal. He asks me not to take any photos, though, because “it could’ve been someone’s beloved pet.”

  This, then, is the dissection laboratory of the Royal Veterinary College.

  Around the room are classic stainless-steel dissection tables with plugholes in the middle. On one of the tables is “the cutest little baby sheep,” as I put it, embarrassing myself again, and on the next table over is a snow leopard. It’s a bit less cute because it’s not only dead, but at the tail end of being dissected. In fact, the only bits left that still are recognisably snow leopard are its tail and a paw.

  “Can I stroke the snow leopard?” I ask.

  “Sure. It might be a bit bloody, though.”

  I stroke the tail of a snow leopard for the first and, I’m sure, last time in my life.

  “Why are you dissecting a snow leopard?” I ask.

  “Well, for one, we were sent a dead snow leopard.” I imagine the postman getting a snow leopard–shaped parcel out of his van. “And it’ll tell us something about how the animal functions, as we’re doing a study to document how the different species of cat differ: from domestic moggies all the way up to leopards, lions, and tigers.” When Professor Hutchinson pushes one of the snow leopard’s surprisingly large and sharp-looking claws out of its paw, it becomes very clear to me how it functions. The snow leopard is exactly the kind of predator that would eat a mountain goat alive. Yes, if I knew I might be being stalked by a snow leopard at any time, being constantly on edge would come naturally.

  Snow leopard, dissected.

  “I love studying anatomy. It’s got the beautiful, the macabre, the boring, the disgusting
, the mundane, the shocking—it’s got everything.”

  I’m revelling somewhat in the macabre. There is a spiky vice for clamping large bits of dead animal and a wheelbarrow containing the hooves, removed, of some creature. I ask casually how many goats Professor Hutchinson has dissected. To my surprise he says he hasn’t dissected any.

  “I’ve done a sheep and plenty of other cloven-hoofed animals. I did a giraffe just last week, but a goat? Can’t say that I have. Almost everything but a goat, in fact. The trouble is, we just don’t get a lot of them around here. No one would bring a goat to the vet school because the bills would probably be pretty high. We tend to deal with valuable animals like racehorses. Unless someone had a goat that they just really dearly loved and they were willing to spend a few hundred pounds to bring it to a top clinic, they’ll say, ‘Sorry, old goat, you’ve lived a long and happy life. It’s time to go to sleep.’”

  Winner of the “Most Beautiful Goat” title parading at the Mazayen al-Maaz competition in Riyadh.

  Well, I happen to know that in Saudi Arabia there are some very valuable goats. They have special goat beauty contests, and a fine-looking goat is worth tens of thousands of pounds.

  “If I got a dead goat, could we dissect it?”

  “Sure. I’d love to dissect a goat. It’d be interesting. But animals tend to die at inconvenient moments; you don’t get a lot of notice. Frozen would be how you’d want to get it here.”

  Well, I would find dissecting a goat interesting, too.

  Now, where might I find a beloved goat unfortunately in need of an autopsy?

  Buttercups is heaven on earth for goats, but where do they go after goat heaven? And would it be possible to divert one from wherever they go to the dissection laboratory at the RVC, for the sake of the arts, in my case, and the sciences, in Professor Hutchinson’s?