GoatMan

How I Took a Holiday from Being Human

Thomas Thwaites

• Publisher: Princeton Architectural Press
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781616894054
• eBook ISBN: 9781616894931
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Science Biographies
• Index: Social Sciences

The dazzling success of The Toaster Project, including TV appearances and an international book tour, leaves Thomas Thwaites in a slump. His friends increasingly behave like adults, while Thwaites still lives at home, "stuck in a big, dark hole." Luckily, a research grant offers the perfect out: a chance to take a holiday from the complications of being human—by transforming himself into a goat. What ensues is a hilarious and surreal journey through engineering, design, and psychology, as Thwaites interviews neuroscientists, animal behaviorists, prosthetists, goat sanctuary workers, and goatherds.From this, he builds a goat exoskeleton—artificial legs, helmet, chest protector, raincoat from his mum, and a prosthetic goat stomach to digest grass (with help from a pressure cooker and campfire)—before setting off across the Alps on four legs with a herd of his fellow creatures. Will he make it? Do Thwaites and his readers discover what it truly means to be human? GoatMan tells all in Thwaites's inimitable style, which NPR extols as "a laugh-out- loud-funny but thoughtful guide through his own adventures."

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 ac...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction
• Soul
• Mind
• Body
• Guts
• Goat Life
• Acknowledgments
• Selected Bibliography and Credits
• Copyright
• About the Author