GoatMan

by Thomas Thwaites

  After all, it was likely some sort of gut infection that did it for poor old Venus. Dr. Stoll microscopically examined the biopsies he’d taken from her intestines and saw her intestinal walls were thickened, which is consistent with Johne’s disease, but didn’t see any of the MAP bacteria that causes it. His conclusion was inconclusive: it could’ve been Johne’s disease, or Venus could’ve been dying of some other unknown intestinal colonisation. I, of course, would have tried to take my sample of rumen fluid from a goat without a visible case of infection by the bacteria some scientists suspect of causing the painful and currently incurable Crohn’s disease. But even then, introducing a whole range of tough, new goat-specialised bacteria into my own delicately balanced internal microbiome…Well, the results, as Dr. Kingston-Smith put it, might not be altogether benign.

  The reason certain microbes can feed off grass is because they produce certain enzymes—cellulases—that break down the tough cellulose molecules into digestible sugars. This ability isn’t useful to just goats. Cellulose is the main component of plant cell walls, the most abundant carbohydrate in nature. There’s a big push to make biofuel from it: to ferment straw, corn husks, wood—any sort of fibrous agricultural waste—into sugars and then into alcohol. One of the ways this is done experimentally is to mix the plant waste with purified cellulase extracted from a bacteria that seems to produce a lot of it, Trichoderma reesei (the bacteria was first brought to the attention of scientists by the US Army, as it kept digesting the canvas of their tents on the Solomon Islands in World War II). Biofuel converted enzymatically from cellulose is a great hope of the industry. If they can break down agricultural waste into sugar and ferment it into alcohol for fuel, well, we’ve got fuel from waste. At the moment, however, the enzymes are just too expensive to make it economical.

  Cellulase enzyme extracted from bacteria is also used in the food industry. It’s mixed with the fibrous pulp of fruits left over after they’ve had the juice squeezed out of them to break down those fibres into sugar and convert every last possible bit of fruit into lovely, enzymatically liquefied juice. If it’s used in the food industry, it must be safe for human consumption, right?! So I could use this same purified cellulase enzyme in my artificial rumen to break down the cellulose in grass into sugars that’ll nourish me on my Alpine sojourn. While not ideal—as my artificial rumen won’t be self-sustaining but instead reliant on injections of this enzyme—there are some advantages, too. Chief among these is I won’t risk the possibility of giving myself some horrible parasitic infection. It’d basically just be like eating biological washing powder: could make you sick or kill you if you eat enough of it but won’t actually start living inside you.

  It’s pretty expensive stuff, and, being an industrial product, it is sold in industrial quantities. But I eventually find the website of a supplier that will sell me less than 200 litres and for a reasonable price. It says they strictly supply only researchers affiliated with official establishments. Well, I’m arguably a researcher; my research question is somewhat unconventional and probably not quite the kind of thing the supplier means, but then who am I to judge what is and isn’t research? And in any case, all you have to do is tick a box to say you’re doing research and pick a name of a research institute from a drop-down list and job done—in the post.

  I get on with preparations for my journey: contacting goatherds, trying to work out a route across the Alps, and casting my artificial rumen in silicone. It’s a U-shaped bag, with a tube into which I will spit chewed- up grass and another tube from which I will suck the hopefully sugary enzymatically degraded product. It also includes a reservoir in the middle for the cellulase enzyme.

  Things begin to move fast. Dr. Heath gets in touch to say they’ve pretty much finished my legs, and could I come up for a final fitting? I hop on the train. They’re not quite what I was expecting, but I slip them on my arms. The front legs are solid; the back ankle-foot orthotics basically look like wedge heels, because basically that’s what they are.

  The look is cross-dresser at the back end, post–World War II NHS amputee patient at the front, but they work. I’m able to clomp around the workshop in fine quadruped fashion! Without the use of my hands, they’re quite difficult to take off. So when Dr. Heath goes off to a meeting, I’m left to myself, sort of trapped as a goat. I start to get hungry, and there’s a chocolate bar on the worktop, and the only way I can get into it is to grab the end of the wrapper between my teeth and shake violently, flinging the chocolate bar across the room. To get it back off the workshop floor I bend my wrists and lay my new forelegs flat on the floor, using my lips to nudge the chocolate bar into a position that I can attack with my teeth. Sure, it’d be easier if I just had a longer neck, but I’m managing, just about. When Dr. Heath returns and sees me struggling to eat the thing, quite unthinkingly he retrieves the half-chewed chocolate bar mostly still in its wrapper from the floor and feeds me the rest from his hand. I feel most goatlike.1

  Nice legs!

  We complete the final modifications, and I thank Dr. Heath and Geoff, who wish me well with the trip.

  “Don’t bloody kill yourself,” says Geoff.

  The departure date is nearing, and I’m spending late nights making myself some less cross-dressy, more rugged, energy-returning rear-hoof prosthetics as well as a supportive kind of bodice. It also dawns on me that unless my mother wants me to freeze to death in the wind-driven rain of the Alps, she needs to help me make some sort of waterproof coat that’ll fit over my goat parts. The first coat, being shiny pink polyester, does not help with the whole cross-dressing goat vibe, so I set her to work on something with more of a goatlike palette.

  My bottle of cellulase enzyme arrives, and I stick it in the fridge per the storage instructions. There are a few warnings that it’s not safe for human consumption, however. Are they just covering themselves, I wonder? I fire off an email to the supplier, mentioning a few aspects of what I’m intending to do and asking what sort of concentrations they’d recommend for digesting grass and so on.

  I receive a short and stiffly worded email back, which begins: “Under no circumstances should you attempt what you suggest in your message below.” It goes on to say that for a number of reasons (that they don’t elucidate) what I propose may pose “significant health risks.” The email also states that as I’m not associated with an institution with a defined and comprehensive health and safety policy, as I’d claimed, I should immediately “dispose of the enzyme by washing it down a drain with plenty of water, or by flushing it down a toilet.”

  Irritant.

  The next day I’m contacted by the Wellcome Trust. The supplier of the enzyme has gotten in touch with them, too, and they’re deeply concerned. The “Trust would not support you undertaking this activity against clear expert guidance.” Furthermore, they note that in the correspondence the supplier had forwarded to them, I had been talking about “goats rather than elephants, as proposed in your application.…I would be grateful if you would confirm receipt of this email and clarify the situation as a matter of urgency.”

  They want me to put all activity on hold and come in for a meeting.

  Ahh, yes. The Wellcome Trust still thinks I’m doing a project about elephants. I had forgotten to tell them about my early goat-related epiphany. Darn. With just days to go until the Alpine trip, this is bad news. I’m not entirely sure why I didn’t think to let the people who signed up to fund an elephant project know that it had changed to a goat project, but I genuinely think it’s because Annette’s words had just seemed so correct to me. Or perhaps I was subconsciously following the advice of Werner Herzog, that it’s better to apologise than ask permission.

  I prepare a presentation of justifications as to why goats are artistically, spiritually, and intellectually superior animals to try and become than elephants. It seems to go well, but the Trust remains unconvinced and asks me to keep things on hold while they discuss with the committee whether they can continue to be associat
ed with this no-longer-elephant-related project.

  Oh, dear. It couldn’t have come at a more crucial time. To put everything on hold is just not possible. Weirdly enough, I’ve been contacted by a media company asking if I’m “interested in creating some YouTube content for a global drinks brand.” Would attempting to become a goat in order to take a holiday from the existential pain of being a human fit with their brand values? If it means finishing the project, I guess I could brand myself. It’d be terribly painful though.

  But the good old Wellcome Trust gets back in touch. And though they ask that I don’t use the troublesome cellulase enzyme and that I please let them know if I’m thinking of making any more fundamental changes to the project, we’re back on.

  Without my cellulase, how am I going to digest grass? As a last resort, I purchase an Army-surplus pressure cooker that I hope is safe to use on a campfire. In my research into the methods the biofuel industry is developing to break down cellulose, I’d read about a process called “explosive steam treatment with acid hydrolysis.” It involves heating plant material in a high-pressure chamber, then suddenly reducing the pressure, followed by heating with dilute acid. The process isn’t practical for creating biofuels because the sugar yields aren’t high enough and it requires an input of fuel to heat things up. It’s not ideal for me, either, for the same reason, but I’m kind of desperate. My new plan is to chew up grass and spit it into my “rumen” to store it as I wander in the fields by day, then process the day’s grass with the pressure cooker on a campfire at night using explosive steam treatment and acid hydrolysis, so I can eat and digest it. Not perfect, but I get Simon to take out his clothes so he can pack the pressure cooker in his bag, and off we go. The Swiss Alps beckon.

  1 Baaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa!

  Goat Life

  Bannalpsee, Wolfenschiessen, Switzerland

  (sunny but cold)

  Ahhhh, Switzerland. Home of immoral banking practices, half the world’s largest particle accelerator, the relocated von Trapp family of The Sound of Music, and a goat farm high in the Alps that I’ve been communicating with via email.

  My plan is to go and hang out as a goat with some of their goats, so I can learn their ways before attempting to cross the Alps to satisfy the conditions of my Wellcome Trust grant and thus hopefully mend some fences. I very much hope that spending time with the Alpine goats, going where they go, eating what they eat, and so on will effect an internal as well as an external change in my nature.

  My niggling anxiety is that though I’ve arranged with the goat farmers to stay at their goat farm, I’ve not said what I’m hoping to do there, namely, the whole wearing of quadruped prosthetics and hanging out with their goats. The problem was that even trying to arrange the stay was difficult due to the language barrier. They claimed their English was terrible, but my Schwiizertüütsch is worse. Online translation helped with the to and fro of emails, but there were some odd-seeming outputs, which made me nervous about applying it to what would have to be a quite nuanced proposal, along the lines of “Could I come to your farm and eat grass and sleep with your goats?”

  Switzerland: happiest nation on Earth according to the UN World Happiness Report.

  At five o’clock in the morning, Simon, Tim—who’d come to take photos—and I had met at London Bridge. Now we have just caught the last cable car up the side of an Alp. The general inadequacy of my communications with the Alpine goat farm is rapidly becoming clear. Upon arriving at the upper cable car station, we see no sign of a goat farm. There is, however, a whole further stretch of mountain. The goat farm, according to Google Translate, is at the top of the Alp, and I assumed the cable car would pretty much take us the whole way there. Clearly not. So we’ll just have to walk. Except the only way I can see to get to the top is a zigzagging path up an extremely steep-looking scree slope. Oh well, nothing for it. We’re making our way across a dam that’s holding back the waters of a beautiful mountain lake when we meet a man coming the other way. He looks oddly at us as I ask him in slow and loud English if this is the way to the farm at the top of the Alps.

  Yes, he says, but you’ll never get there with that. He’s talking about my big suitcase on wheels, which is the smallest bag I’d been able to pack the goat legs and so on into. Simon and Tim have big rucksacks with equipment and food and clothes. He explains that there are two options for the route to the farm: either very long and more gentle, or shorter but up a path suitable “only for rock climbers.” He’s pretty emphatic that we’ll die if we try to do it with our luggage or at least that we’ll be stuck on the side of the mountain overnight. We return with him to the little cable car station, where he gets in the cable car and…off it goes, the last cable car going down, leaving us to contemplate the peace and tranquility and failing light, halfway up an Alp.

  The Swiss man is adamant that a suitcase is not correct mountain-climbing equipment.

  Once again I find myself up a mountain, woefully underprepared, with my friend Simon.

  “Right, there’s nothing for it. We’re going to have to bury our luggage and hike up the mountain before it gets dark.” Simon begins to grumble. I’m looking around for a suitable place to start digging, when out of nowhere another Swiss man appears, this one very small and wearing a hat. I explain our predicament, and at first he doesn’t appear to understand. I do some excellent gestural communication work, the penny drops, and he smiles gleefully and beckons us to follow him down a small hidden path away from the lake. At the end is another cable car; this one, however, is much more rickety. The “car” is an open wooden trough, its cables rising extremely steeply towards the top of the mountain. He smiles again, points at me and wags his finger, points at our luggage and nods his head, and off he dances, disappearing into the dark Alpine forest as suddenly as he’d appeared.

  Somewhere up there is our goat farm.

  Loading up our luggage.

  We load up the baggage trough and set off on foot. Presumably, the baggage car is operated from the top, where we need to get ourselves before it gets dark. The going, as promised, is steep, especially up the zigzagging scree path, but after an hour or so we reach a plateau and head towards three buildings that must be the goat farm.

  At last, the goat farm!

  Maybe it’s just the language barrier, maybe it’s just their way, but the three goat farmers—Sepp, his wife, Rita, and their farmhand—seem reserved. In contrast, I’m in full hyped-up flow, saying a hundred words to every one of theirs but probably not getting across much more information. I’m nervous because at some point I’m going to need to let the cat out of the bag and introduce the purpose of our visit. The farm does offer overnight accommodation to walkers in the Alps, and, yes, I’m here to walk in the Alps, but I need to say that I intend to walk on four legs with their goats. The Swiss aren’t known for embracing the unconventional. And admittedly I’m just further drawing on stereotype, but I don’t think rural farmers are known for their love of experimental contemporary design practice, either.

  I communicate to Sepp that we put our bags in the trough halfway down the mountain. Sepp acknowledges this with a nod and disappears into the farmhouse, leaving us to wander around. It’s a beautiful spot: a grassy plateau between the craggy bulk of the remaining mountain rising up behind the farm and a vertiginous drop into the valley below. I can’t see any goats, though.

  We hear an engine sputter to life somewhere, and the big wheels of the baggage lift start hauling the cable and our trough of luggage up the mountain. As it comes to the top, Sepp appears, and as we unload our baggage, by way of conversation I ask where the goats are. He nods at the big shed.

  “Cool,” I say. “So you keep them inside for the night?”

  He nods.

  “So where shall we sleep?”

  He nods at the big shed.

  “Perfect,” I say, and we follow Sepp into the barn. The accommodation is on a mezzanine above the goat floor (a kind of hayloft, I guess), and the barn echoes with
the clanking of goat bells and is filled with the very strong smell of the herd below. Ideal. We get settled and start thinking about dinner. Tim and Simon have no intention of eating grass, and I, well, I’m not a goat yet. Sepp has started a fire in a little covered area next to the farmhouse, so we make our approach.

  “Wow, a wood-fired bread oven! That’s clever, Sepp! Mind if we join? And cook some things? Brill, thanks…So, nice weather? No? Raining all summer? Oh, that’s a shame. It’s getting pretty cold. Freezing? Yes, I suppose. That’s why the goats are in the barn? Yes, thought so. I suppose you’ll let them out again tomorrow to roam the Alps in the morning? No? Oh.”

  Sepp explains that it’s getting too cold up here, the grass is getting patchy, and soon it’ll snow, so tomorrow is going to be the day when he herds the goats from the high Alpine pastures in which they graze over the warm summer months, down the Alp to spend their winter in the valley. This migration has been the traditional way of grazing livestock in the Alps for perhaps five thousand years.

  Right. I need to ask if Sepp will herd me, which for some reason is a slightly uncomfortable thing to ask a man you’re barbecuing with.

  “That goat migration sounds really interesting, Sepp. I don’t suppose we could come along? If we like? Brilliant. And the thing is, Sepp, I’m doing this project. And, well, I was hoping I might sort of join the goats. Sort of with four legs? Sort of as one of your goats? If you see what I mean?”

  Clanky, smelly roommates.