GoatMan

by Thomas Thwaites

  I’m a little wary of broaching the subject with Bob at the sanctuary. According to the New York Times, goats are the “most widely eaten” species of animal (though according to the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organisation, which actually does surveys—counting cows from planes and so on—the New York Times is wrong). Whatever the case, goats are certainly one of the top ten most-slaughtered animals globally. It’s estimated by the UN that a million are killed daily, for the express purpose of being cut up, so it would seem kind of inconsequential to take one goat that had already died and dissect it. Not many of those million other goats would have been given names, though.

  So it is with some trepidation that I go back to Buttercups and ask Bob in a roundabout way if it might be possible to dissect one of his goats.

  “No, you can’t,” says Bob. “We promise that when a goat comes here, it’ll be looked after and respected for the rest of its life, and I think that promise continues even after its death.”

  So that’s that. But then I explain that I’m not talking about some sort of DIY situation in my bathtub, but an expert operation at the Royal Veterinary College with a professor and his students, who get to dissect all manner of exotic creatures but never see any goats. And Bob starts to consider the idea. Buttercups doesn’t have goat funerals or its own goat graveyard. No, pragmatically, any goat corpses are collected by a specialised company that takes them to Brighton to be incinerated. The rules for moving dead livestock around the country are extremely strict, due to the potential for moving around whichever possibly contagious pathogen killed the animal as well. Evidently, however, discussions among the staff and volunteers take place to which I am not party, as one of Bob’s volunteer goatkeepers, who admits to “knowing all about artists and what they get up to,” seeks me out as I wander around the yard. I assure him I’m not intending some sort of satanic goat desecration performance art. The outcome is that although some of the volunteers are unhappy with the idea, the conversation moves from flat “no” to a “maybe”—if I can sort out the regulatory and logistical issues.

  While I await the call from Buttercups that one of their goats has answered the call of the infinite, I try to make some better goat legs with the assistance of my puppeteer friend, Ivan Thorley. Our goal is to make a new exoskeleton prototype, armed with some insight from Professor Hutchinson. The idea for the forelegs is to make hollow fibreglass “bones,” into which I can insert my forearms, and aluminium tubing in lieu of elongated metacarpals, thus turning my arms and hands into legs and hooves.

  Simple—yet until you’ve actually had to take the weight of your body—for a sustained length of time—on a bit which isn’t meant to take that weight (like the flesh of your forearm), you just don’t realise how much heavy baggage you carry around with you, as you. We make some progress; it certainly produces the best walking gait of the exoskeletons so far. However, it’s difficult to optimise the structure, given the subtleties of wrist joints and weight distribution and the significant problem of how to minimise the pain where body meets machine. In the end, what our exoskeleton really excels at is cutting off the circulation and giving painful Chinese burns.

  It strikes me that we are running into a lot of the same problems with our exoskeleton that, I imagine, arise for prosthetists when making a new limb for an amputee. So I refer myself to a prosthetics clinic at the University of Salford, where a Dr. Glyn Heath works. Dr. Heath is a prosthetist but got his PhD in zoology, an unusual combination that gives me hope he might have some advice on my conundrum. To my delight, he invites me up to the clinic, so off I hop to Salford, my latest front legs folded into a suitcase.

  Dr. Heath, prosthetist, zoologist, and (I discover) charity worker, union rep, and self-described “pain in the neck to those in power,” explains that he invited me for an initial consultation because he has become intrigued by this proposal.

  “It’s totally alien to the way I normally think, you see. And then it got rather interesting…I couldn’t help but try and think of ways to do it. Completely wrong-footed by it.”

  I suppose it’s fairly rare for a prosthetist to make front legs. But actually Dr. Heath does occasionally make prosthetics for animals, pet dogs, and such. So he’s made a couple of front legs before but concedes he’s never made front legs for a human. I ask if any of his patients has ever asked for a special job, a replacement limb with interesting modifications or improvements over the biological original.

  “Not a chance. In all of history no one has made a prosthetic that improves on the human body.”

  “What about those carbon fibre ones worn at the Paralympics?”

  “The people wearing them don’t go about in those all day, do they? They take them off after the race. They’re specialised for only one specific type of activity, you see.”

  “What about modifications?”

  “Well, suits of armour were the first prosthetics. They might stop your head getting cut off, but they stop you doing most everything else, too, ha, haha!”

  Dr. Glyn Heath, Geoff, and the legs I made with Ivan.

  Dr. Heath introduces me to his prosthetics technician, Geoff, and I explain my dream: to be free to gallop like a goat. Their reaction is similar to that of Professor Hutchinson, involving a sort of expectation management. They know a lot that I don’t but are seeking to let me down easily. But whereas with Professor Hutchinson the focus was on the millions of years of evolutionary distance between people and goats, with Dr. Heath and Geoff the conversation quickly turns to pain. These are clinicians, not researchers. Much of their job involves making practical interventions in an attempt to alleviate the pain caused to people by their own bodies, bodies that are malformed either from disease or from surgical intervention. And when I say I need to cross the Alps on four legs, there is a bit of an outcry.

  “Ho, ho, ho!” Dr. Heath is a jovial fellow and punctuates his conversation with laughter. “How long have you got? Maybe if you were a carnivore…because then you could just sleep for eighteen hours a day! A ruminant has to cover a bit more ground, though, ha, haha.” He continues, “I would dispute in the strongest terms whether you’d be able to walk for more than twenty- or thirty-minute stints—at an absolute maximum! And it won’t even be fatigue that’ll stop you. It’ll be the pressure on parts of your body that will destroy you before you fatigue.”

  Geoff chimes in: “It’ll make you ache in places you didn’t know you had.”

  “Yes, Geoff’s right. We can reduce the pain by making things more comfortable, but the pressure on parts of your body is still there, and the pressure will destroy you.”

  Destroy is a strong word, but they are emphatic. What about the man who had a prosthetic leg and did a marathon?

  “Well, that’s good for him,” says Geoff, “but from a clinical point of view, I think that’s madness. I’d like to see his stump afterwards; it’d be like a tenderised ham. But even then, at least he’s still upright; you’re gonna have a whole host of other problems. Like how are you gonna hold your head up? That’s gonna bloody hurt ’n’ all. Goats and what have you have something called a nuchal ligament. It runs along the back of the neck, like a taut piece of rope, and helps them keep their heads up. But you don’t have one of those. And I’ll tell you what: I’d say you’re better off not making one, because it might make you too comfortable. We want you to get tired, see, so you have to stop. We don’t want you to keep your head up for too long, as it could affect your nerves, as well as the blood flow to your head.”

  “Ha, ha. I think the blood flow to his head might’ve been affected already, Geoff!”

  “You really want to be safe, particularly where your neck and spine are concerned, ’cos otherwise you’ll be back here as a patient.”

  “Yes, actually, Geoff’s right,” Dr. Heath says, becoming serious. “We don’t want you back as a paraplegic.”

  I have to agree. The goal is to gain, not lose, the use of some legs.

  I ask what the mo
st common reason is for needing a prosthetic limb. Dr. Heath has just returned from Turkey, where he was working with a charity, training prosthetists. There the most common reason for a prosthetic is the trauma of the war next door in Syria. But in societies where civilians aren’t subject to mass violence, to my surprise, most amputations aren’t due to gruesome accidents with power tools or traumatic events like road accidents, but poor lifestyle “choices” (bad diet and smoking). These cause diabetes, which can cause damage to the nerves in the limbs, which means pain messages from the limbs aren’t transmitted properly. So someone can develop a small foot problem, say, a blister, and just ignore it because it’s not registering as painful, so it’s easy to ignore. And the person will just carry on walking on it, ignoring the problem—because, after all, sometimes it can be a hassle and in some places expensive to see a doctor—and the little blister develops into a sore, still painless, which gets worse and worse until it becomes gangrenous. And by then it can have gotten so bad that the only remedy is to amputate the limb. There’s a good evolutionary explanation for why pain is painful: it’s difficult to ignore. So Geoff’s idea that they want me to feel pain as a goat seems less gratuitous and more like a sensible precaution.

  Unhealthy lifestyle being the number-one cause of amputations strikes me as a peculiarly counterclockwise chain of cause and effect. Human beings are supposed to be good at modifying our environment. After all, we modified wild species of grasses into domestic wheat and rice and corn, and have modified 37 percent of the Earth’s land area to grow these food crops and raise billions of livestock animals. But now the environment we’ve created, rich in sugar and fat and alcohol and tobacco, with the majority of work and entertainment involving sitting in a chair, seems to be modifying us back.

  I reassure Dr. Heath and Geoff that this becoming-a-goat-and-crossing-the-Alps business is entirely my own responsibility, that I’m an adult of sound mind and judgement and that if I did end up back at their clinic as a patient, it would be entirely my own fault and so on.

  “OK, we’ll make you some legs,” Dr. Heath says.

  Result.

  “But it’ll take a while. How long have you got?”

  I explain that I’m keen to avoid the rutting season but also keen to not freeze to death, so “until late September.” They’ve both got prosthetics to make for people not interested in holidaying from humanity, meaning they’d be working on mine outside normal clinic hours, so Dr. Heath would like to get going as soon as possible. He asks to see my quadruped gait. I get out my pair of sawn-off crutches that I’ve made specially and set off round the clinic. I’m pretty slow at first, but I gradually achieve a four-legged walking gait quite well.

  Practising walking as a quadruped round the prosthetics clinic.

  He and Geoff are commenting as I do so, criticising everything that’s wrong with my two-legged body’s attempt at becoming four legged.

  “Your back legs are too long. Your pelvis is about 135 degrees out of alignment. You need at least 60 percent of your weight on your front. You’re plantigrade, not unguligrade, but we could probably make you an AFO that would give you digitigrade rear-foot action.” (An AFO is an ankle-foot orthosis, I later learn.)

  I’m keen to graduate from walking, so I clamber up on a chair, intending to jump off again, goatlike, front first. However, that deep instinct for preserving the integrity of one’s body kicks in, and I’m suddenly a bit timid.

  “You do that sort of thing and you’ll dislocate your shoulder, break your clavicle, and knacker your ligaments, and that’s no fun,” Geoff says. “The reason why a goat can jump from such great heights is its body can fall away from its scapula. It’s got no bony connection between its front limbs and the rest of the body. So when it lands on its front feet from a great height, its body just carries on and springs back, like the body’s joined to the top of the legs with elastic bands. You, however, have a bony connection between your arms and the rest of you—at the clavicle.”

  There are, of course, many other subtleties in the human body that you just don’t think about when you’re healthily moving around in daily life, but which become apparent when they stop working so well (or when they start getting in the way of your desire to gallop). Joints like knees and elbows, I thought, had a fairly obvious range of motion, but in fact they are moving and adjusting in all sorts of ways. As for the shoulder, “it’s all over the place.”

  “You take your movement for granted, but when you actually try and work out what’s going on with just a single joint when you walk around, well—”

  This means that Dr. Heath and Geoff want my goat suit to have as few prosthetic joints as possible, because their external joints won’t be able to match the range of movement of my biological ones, so will in fact restrict my movement: the more there are, the more encumbered I become. My vision is scaling back from a sort of full-body exoskeleton to something a little…simpler.

  Dr. Heath making plaster casts of my limbs.

  Geoff brings out a dusty box of prosthetic joints, which he calls “the art deco of the prosthetics world.” They have a lot of them gathering dust in the stores, because they’re for a style of prostheses once very common, “just after the war.” He’s not talking about the latest Middle Eastern war, either. Basically, they’re the type of joints used for making wooden legs.

  “You get the odd old boy who still wants them,” he says, and he reckons they’re also almost perfect for human-goat prosthetic legs. Simple, strong, able to withstand the toughest Alpine conditions.

  “How fast do you think I’ll be able to gallop, then?” I ask hopefully.

  “I don’t think you’ll ever be able to gallop—”

  “No, you’ll never gallop,” Dr. Heath confirms. Cue sorrowful violins.

  However, as I get back to pacing around as a quadruped with my sawn-off crutches, to Dr. Heath’s absolute amazement I’m able to break into a trot. It’s difficult physically, but mentally, coordinating my four legs in a trotting pattern seems to come naturally. Dr. Heath wonders out loud if there is some residual feedback in my body from when we diverged from quadrupeds. If he were a younger man, he says, he’d want to write a paper on me!

  Later he gets me to demonstrate “my trot” to the other clinical staff. I feel quite proud.

  I’m back at Dr. Heath’s clinic a couple more times in the next few days so he can take plaster casts of my limbs. He warns me:

  “You’ll only ever be a human in a goat walking position, constrained by your own natural anatomy. While Geoff and I make these, I think you need to do some stretching exercises to try and get more range in the pelvis and stretch your hamstrings and get your knees towards your chest.”

  And that is when I decide to take up yoga.

  Poor old Venus: on her last legs.

  And then I get the call. “Buttercups…A goat called Venus…Very poorly…Calling in the vet…Have you worked out the transport to the RVC?”

  I have worked out transport, in that I’ve become a licensed haulier of Category 2 animal by-products. Yes, gentle reader, if you need some dead animals moving around Britain, I’m your man. Though I can’t take any spinal cords or brains that’ve already been cut out of an animal, as those are Category 1.

  So I drive up to Buttercups. When I arrive, Venus is still alive but very thin. Gower, the general manager, explains that the vet suspects Venus is wasting away due to something called Johne’s disease. This is caused by a particularly unfriendly bacteria that moves into the gastrointestinal tract and causes the intestinal wall to thicken, which fatally degrades the animal’s ability to absorb nutrients. It’s the same bacteria— Mycobacterium avium ss. paratuberculosis, or MAP for short—that some suspect is the cause of Crohn’s disease in humans. Johne’s disease is highly infectious among livestock, with the ability to quickly spread through a herd via the poo-grass-mouth vector, which is worrying Gower, so he’s keen to verify the vet’s hypothesis. This would require microscopically exami
ning a sample of Venus’s intestinal wall at autopsy, and that’s what the scientists and vets at the RVC are exceptionally good at doing.

  Left: Well, the end comes to us all, and then that’s (probably) it. Right: Luckily she just squeezes into the fridge.

  Venus perks up a bit while I’m there, but Gower says animals can often seem better for a while just before a terminal decline, and so it goes with Venus. Two days later, on Sunday, I get the call again. Gower says the vet has euthanised her, as they didn’t want her to suffer unnecessarily.

  So I borrow my dad’s car and drive back to Buttercups to collect Venus’s body.

  Rigor mortis has set in, but Venus has died in quite a compact posture, so we are able to seal her in the plastic bags I’ve brought along. The fact that it’s Sunday, however, means I can’t take her to the RVC until the morning, so necessity demands that Venus must overnight packed in ice in a makeshift morgue, i.e., my fridge. (Sensitive readers, look away now.)

  The following day I drive Venus’s body to Professor Hutchinson’s freezer. Later that evening I drive my girlfriend’s sister to the hospital as she goes through the advanced stages of labour. She doesn’t decide to name her baby Venus, but in anticipation of when you’re old enough to read, let me take this opportunity to say: “Hello, Florence!” Though I don’t mention it to your mother at the time, having had poor, dead Venus just a few hours previously in the same spot where your mother is very nearly having you does make me contemplate how both ends of the circle of life came so close to meeting in the backseat of Dad’s thirdhand Mercedes.

  Dissecting Venus turns into a two-day process, because when we unwrap her, she still needs some thawing out towards her middle. Professor Hutchinson begins by removing the skin, and after a bit of scalpel safety training, I’m allowed to muck in and help. We reveal a patch of green-blue flesh in Venus’s haunch. This is where the injection that killed her was administered, dyed green-blue as a safety mechanism. If you’re ever served a green-blue steak, you’re probably dining on racehorse. It would be an interesting meal for other reasons, too, as the injection is a cocktail of ketamine and barbiturates.