MEN & GOATS

Seeing the words, “The Men Who Stare at Goats” in my newspaper the other day gave me a start. Seeing it linked with the Coen Brothers made me gasp. And then I had a tiny heart palpitation when I saw that the movie was R rated. I’m sorry, folks, but I’m an old codger (if codgers are inclusive of females) and I feel like I spend half my time tiptoeing around to avoid seeing or hearing things that my prudish upbringing demanded I not see or hear.

So you can imagine my relief at realizing that goats are not sheep, if you get what I mean.

So now, I think, it is possible that if the movie is truly “A Wildly Funny Ride” and the R simply means for language, some drug content and brief nudity, then I just might be able to safely go see it in the theater. As always, though, I’ll wait for my daughter Kerry to see it first, and she will let me know, as I have asked her to, whether it would be ok for me to see the picture.

Now having settled that in my mind, I did see a movie promo on the TV screen that showed a goat falling over with its legs stick straight. OMG, I said to myself. They have a Tennessee Fainting goat! And for that reason only, I’m hoping Kerry will give me a thumbs up. I am fascinated by Fainting goats.

Way back when I started blogging, I wrote a whole blog on goats, prompted by discovering a small goat farm down the road from us here in Riverside County. The goat population is kept in the front yard of the house, fenced off from a rural road that is one of the few roads in this part of the county that doesn’t get bisected by freight train tracks and thus I use it a lot to get down to one of the few shopping areas locally. So in traveling down Pedley Avenue, one has to go past the goats and as often as not, stop and look at them. The owners have built little wooden “toys” for the goats to climb on, and there is always one goat or another sitting on top of a miniature house or on the high end of a teeter-totter type board.

When I first saw these cute but fairly ordinary-looking goats, I had never heard of the Fainting variety. But in wondering what breed the Pedley goats might be, I checked with Google and that is where I found the Tennessee Fainting Goats. Wikipedia (which is getting better at documenting their sources, I think) says this: A fainting goat is a breed of domestic goat whose muscles freeze for roughly 10 seconds when the goat is startled. Though painless, this generally results in the animal collapsing on its side. The characteristic is caused by a hereditary genetic disorder called myotonia congenita. When startled, younger goats will stiffen and fall over. Older goats learn to spread their legs or lean against something when startled, and often they continue to run about in an awkward, stiff-legged shuffle.

The goats that live by us are not fainters; if they were I’d probably spend a long time each day hanging on the fence laughing at them. (How rude, I hear my cousin, the vet say!) But just so you’ll understand why I would laugh, here is a video that shows the goats fainting.



If this is ALL that happens in “The Men Who Stare at Goats,” then for sure I can handle it!