Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind production of My Heart Radio. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick, and we are back with part three of our series on the Goat and the Devil, where we are exploring reasons for the some would say unfair association in especially Christian cultures, between the ordinary domestic goat, a wonderful animal, and the demonic realm of sin and flames. Now, in previous episodes, we've talked about the basic biology of the goat is a browsing bovid that was once adapted to harsher environments like mountains and forests, but sometime many thousands of years ago, was domesticated by the humans who used to hunt it. We talked about mythical inspirations for later goatman devil's paly, lying in the figure of the Greek god Pan and in the satyrs and fawns that bore his image. We talked about goat reproduction and goat voices. How it's possible that goats could be interpreted as sinful by judgmental human eyes because because of the he goat's reputation for being very enthusiastic about mating and the idea that it's possible people have seen goats as uncanny because sometimes some goats, when they kind of moan and scream, they sound freakishly human. Uh. In the second episode, we talked about the role of goats in the Hebrew Bible, where they could be associated with demonic forces because of the ritual of the Day of Atonement, where it is said that one goat is sent off into the wilderness to carry the sins of the people off for as a zel, and that that name is sometimes interpreted as some kind of demonic power. We also talked about goats in the Christian New Testament, where Jesus is said to have given apocalyptic preaching that when the Son of Man comes to bring the of the age, he will separate the righteous from the unrighteous. And what's the image use there. It's as the shepherd separates the sheep from the goats. The goats are the bad ones. And finally, we also talked about goat lore from around the world to point out that the association between goats and evil is by no means universal. There are some very interesting counter examples in Chinese mythology in Basque mythology with this figure of the black billy goat deity who protects livestock and so forth. So it's been a wild ride so far, a wild goat ride. But to kick things off today, I wanted to come back to our discussion about the particular uh features of goat biology that people of centuries past might possibly have interpreted as devilish or sinful in one way uh in someone in one way or another. And the example I wanted to look at here is goat eyes. One might argue that you haven't really been stared at until you've been stared at by a goat, And part of the reason for that is when you're being stared at by a goat, you're not quite sure if you're being stared at by a goat. That's right. It comes down to the the the inhuman shape of the goat pupils. Yeah yeah uh. And before I get there, I want to say that the goats stare does not have to be imbued with any kind of menace. I came across a a very sweet, whimsical little poem. I wanted to read a bit from this is by the British Canadian poet Robert Service, who wrote a poem called the Goat and I and uh it goes each sunny day upon my way a goat I pass. He has a beard of silver gray and a bell of brass, And all the while I am in sight, he seems to muse and stares at me with all his might, and choose, and choose upon the hill, so timy, sweet with joy of spring, he hails me with a tiny bleat of welcoming. Though half the globe is drenched with blood and cities flare contentedly, he choose the cud and does not care. Oh gentle friend, I know not what your age maybe, but of my years I'd give the lot yet left to me to chew a thistle and not choke, but bright of eye gaze at the old world, weary bloke who hobbles by. This is great. I love how this drives some like an overall interpretation of goat physiology that that I think we can often fall into, and that is of the goat as the old goat, Like there's even if a goat. You do see some goats that look, you know, very virile and young, and in a goatish fashion, but oftentimes you'll encounter goats who do kind of hobble about there. They have all these likenesses that we attribute to elderly human individuals. You know, you'll have the beard and so forth. But but yeah, this is a neat little poem summing up the uh, the independent and relatable spirit of the goat. Oh. I also I left off a final stanza where essentially the last stance is just like, why am I writing a poem about a goat? It's not great? Um so, but yeah, anyway, the gaze of the goat has often been observed to have a strange character in one way or another. Sometimes it's it's more like what services saying here, almost narcotically placid and unmoved. And yet other times people notice that the gaze of the goat is kind of thrillingly alien, because, unlike with a dog or a cat, it can be hard to tell if a goat is actually looking at you, or at least for me, it can. Despite the efforts of Robert's service, the the eye of the goat has often been characterized as creepy, and I think there could be a couple of reasons for that. It might be because it's a bit harder to tell where the goat is focusing than it is with some other kind of animals, like our predatory companion animals um Or maybe it's just because the eye of a goat sort of looks weird. It looks unusual if you're not used to it, because laws instead of around pupil as you alluded to earlier, Rob, the goat has a horizontal pupil sometimes described as rectangular in shape I think sometimes kind of described as like elongated capsule shape, so it's like a rectangle with kind of rounded edges. I've also found some photos where it looks like a horizontal capital I with a hint of those cross beams or slight bulges at the ends of the rectangle. And the question is why do goat pupils look that way? Well, funny enough, we actually did an episode just a while back which contained a segment about the evolutionary reasoning behind different pupil shapes in the Animal Kingdom. The episode was The Three Pupil Die, and I think the study we talked about in that show is still a good one to inform us on the question I've just raised. So to to bring up the same paper again. This was by Martins Banks at All published in the journal Science Advances in and it's called why do Animal eyes have pupils of different shapes? Basic conclusion is that an animal's pupil shape is usually determined by what its ecological niches, what its role in the food chain is. So animals like humans, tigers, and wolves have round pupils. Round pupils appear to be common a common shape for active hunters who chase down their prey. Meanwhile, predators that are lower to the ground or hunt by way of ambush, so a predator that might lie in wait and then pound suddenly on a prey animal, these tend to have vertical pupils vertically oriented slit pupils, and the vertical slits seem to be adaptive for low down ambush predators because they're helpful in using tricks called stereopsis and defocus blur to very precisely judge the distance needed for a single uh exact medium range pounds. But herbivores prey animals are more likely to have horizontal pupils like the goat UH. To quote from the study, horizontally elongated pupils creates sharp images of horizontal contours ahead and behind, creating a horizontally panoramic view that facilitates detection of predators from various directions and forward locomotion across uneven terrain. So these horizontal pupils are good for scanning the whole panorama of the environment, seeing at all angles of all the time to watch out for any approaching predators, which might be one of the reasons you can get that creepy feeling where you can't tell if the goat is actually looking at you. The goat is sort of designed by nature to be looking everywhere rather than to be looking at you. But I also thought it's an interesting note about the forward locomotion across uneven terrain given the the evolutionary history of goats occupying mountains and craggy landscape. Though again, less craggy creatures like horses also have horizontal pupils. So that made me wonder about the question why do we tend to notice the horizontal orientation of goat pupils more than we notice it in horses and other herbivores. I think this must be a common thing. It's at least true for me, and so I was looking into this. Uh And I want to make two non expert observations just by looking at a lot of photos on Google. One is that the horse pupil seems less noticeably elongated in the horizontal dimension than the goat pupil. So they're both horizontal, but the horse pupil seems a little bit shorter usually or the goat went off and looks visibly stretched out. Second, and I think this might be even more important, there seems to be, on average, a stronger color contrast within the goat's eye. If you just look at a bunch of pictures of the eyes of horses and the eyes of goats, it seems goats on average have lighter colored irises, which really makes the pupil pop. That makes the people stand out, which makes it look more noticeably alien, at least to me. Interesting. I remember in that episode on The Three People that I we talked about pupil changes in the shape of the pupil with predators tended to vary as well depending on height. Yeah, yeah, that's right, But I don't remember any such distinction being made in the materials we were looking at then regarding herbivores, like if goat versus cow versus horse, etcetera. Yeah, I don't recall any distinction like that either, but definitely there was a change in height, uh in in predators, because again, the taller predators have round pupils and the shorter predators have vertical slip pupils. Uh. And so part of that has to do with a difference in hunting strategy, like chasing versus ambushing, But part of it has to do also with just I think, managing the angles at which you would be observing your prey. Now, this instantly makes me think of something that I guess we got into a little bit in the three people that Eyes. What sort of eyes do we expect? Knowing all of this of divine beings and divine emissaries, Uh, certainly in the like the Irish and uh in some Chinese traditions that we discussed in that episode, we talked about the idea of someone with three pupils or three irises being uh in some way enlightened and having superior vision and perhaps wisdom as well. UH. But but taking all that we've discussed here into the scenario, it's like, Okay, if we have some sort of god or godlike being or anti god taking on the head and eyes of a goat. Well, in a way, it's it seems more fitting. It's like, uh that this is a being that can look in many directions at once and doesn't need to focus its attention and maybe doesn't focus its attention all that much. And hey, being a god, maybe you don't want its attention focused too heavily. Well. Also, the thinking about the predator prey distinction, I mean, shouldn't the horizontal pupils make it less dangerous, Like wouldn't round pupils or really be the most dangerous. Yeah, But then I get it comes down to the human scenario, right. We want to we want to connect with the human in the superhuman, and therefore we want them to have pupils. Though I guess we see, especially in modern depictions, you know, we love to like black out the eyes of inhuman beings, uh, you know, often with those really cool contact lenses. So we'll have various there's so many treatments of this where various fallen angels and so forth, we'll have all black eyes or maybe all white eyes, and that tends to note some sort of strangeness of vision as well. Yeah, I think you're right about that. Like, sometimes otherworldly beings are just depicted as having eyes like that, sometimes their eyes change into all white or all black or something when they are exercising a type of second sight. Wait, it sometimes works quite well, though sometimes you're kind of I think you're kind of inconveniencing your actors by taking away their eyes, are taking away one of their tools. Well, maybe we should look at a little bit more goat mythology and goat symbolism in history. I think if we're trying to figure out why, especially a lot of say Continental European Christian cultures made an association between the devil and goats, I think we must talk about the figure known as Baha Met. Yeah, and this is this is a fascinating but also kind of convoluted UH situation because it involves multiple different cultures either appropriating or interpreting or misinterpreting or outlight rights slandering something that other culture, the previous cultures or or or different cultures believed in or believe in UH. And the end result is this um, this strange satanic goat creature that you're more likely to encounter now in a TV show or on a heavy metal T shirt, that sort of thing. So I covered some of this in a Monster Fact episode about the Goat of Mendis that came about UH shortly after we recorded a weird House cinema episode on the film The Devil Rides Out, which prominently features Uh the Satanic goatman appearing at a black mass. And so this this entity Bapha May or the Goat of Mendi's is essentially a Western occultists distortion of a Greek interpretation of the God of Egypt, the Egyptian god known as but neb Jadette Uh that was worshiped in Mendis, which is the Greek name for an ancient Egyptian city named Jadette, also known today as tell L Ruba. Fifth century Greek historian Herodotus wrote of this god and his practices and made veiled references to sexual aspects of the worship, and also compared the entity to Pan, of course, from from Western traditions. So all already, I know this. This sounds like some sort of You can imagine like the different pins on a board with the different bits of string colored string showing you where all this is going across a map of of Europe. And North Africa. So here's a quote from from Herodotus via S. Birch's translation. Quote. Now, the reason why those of the Egyptians whom I have mentioned do not sacrifice goats, female or male, is this The Mendians count Pan to be one of the eight gods. Now, these eight gods, they say, came into being before the twelve gods, and the painters and image makers represent in painting and in sculpture the figure of Pan, just as the Helenes do with goat's face and legs, not supposing him to be really like this, but to resemble the other gods. The cause, however, why they represent him in this form, I prefer not to say. The Mendesian's then reverence all goats, and the males more than the females, and the goatherds too have greater honor than other herdsman. But the goats one especially is reverenced, and when he dies there is great mourning in all the Mendisian district, and both the goat and Pan are called in the Egyptian tongue Mendies. Okay, So, not knowing exactly what's going on here, I would wonder if Herodotus is seriously misinterpreting reports he has heard about Egyptian worship in light of Greek religion. Yeah, yeah, there's a there's there's clearly a lot going on, like using Greek religion to try and understand what uh individuals in this region are worshiping going You know, there's so many ways that the information here can become skewed. We have this veiled um reference to uh I believe other critics have pointed out that he's he's referencing supposed beast reality uh in worship and so forth. So already we're engaging in uh In in various levels of misinterpretation and perhaps slander. Now, as Geraldine Pinch explains in her excellent book Egyptian Mythology, the word for ram bah and the word for soul or manifestation sound much the same in Egyptian uh to the ancient Egyptians, so they were often regarded as manifestations of other deities such as Osiris and Pinch rights quote. The sexual aspect of the culted Mendis made it particularly disliked by early Christians, but Nebjudet's form as a ram or goat headed man was reinterpreted as a devil figure who entered Western tradition as the Horned King of the Witches. A classic example of literal demonization, taking a god in in another mythology, in this case one having the head of a of a sheep or a goat, and saying that, well, actually, this is just a demon in our mythology, right right, But of course they gets more complicated than that. They are. All these are additional threads going on here, because as for the the actual name Goat of Mendis, this is the name given by French right or Elfeus Levi in the nineteenth century, most likely referencing the writings of Herodotus. The most well known image of this particular monstrous humanoid is in the eighteen fifties sixth edition of Levi's book Dogma and Ritual of High Magic. And as with any many examples of divine and occult imagery, the image of Baha may here Is or the Goat of Mendes is highly symbolic, and it's been incorporated into various occult traditions, subcultures, new religious movements, and so forth. I think everyone's probably seen this. This is the like a a goat being with the the upper body of sometimes a female, but sometimes like half the chest is female half as male. They're like black angelic wings, the goat head, the pentagram on the forehead, a middle horn that is like a torch, various other symbols going on in the image as load it with stuff to look at. Yeah, yeah, so, I mean as far as images of the divine or the demonic, it's a pretty great one. There's lots to focus on, lots to try and figure out. And at the very least, you know, as we've discussed many times before, the basic symbolism involved here of combining beast with man or beast with woman, et cetera. Like, it instantly starts forming patterns in the mind. You can't look at it and not have some sort of reaction. Oh. I don't know if I've noticed this before, but at least in Levi's depiction, it incorporates a symbol that is like the caduceus or like the rod of Asclepius. It has the rod and the snakes intertwined around it. Yeah. Yeah. Now, as for the name Baha may here this gets us into something that we've we've touched on a few times in the on the show before never devoted like full episode to it, but it it involves the Templars, the poor Knights of Christ and the Temple of Solomon's. Just to to get the basics out here again. This was a religious military order of the Catholic Church during the Crusades, which ran about roughly ten through twelve UH. They were This organization was intended to serve as a as a as a way to protect pilgrims on their way to the Holy Lands, but a sort of power creep occurred. They were given free rein to move across borders, They were made exempt from taxes and ended up playing key military roles in various battles of the Crusades, and even the non warriors became important, managing the movement of funds across vast distances UH that were involved in the Crusades and setting up a kind of proto banking system. They became powerful, and so they made powerful enemies, and as the Crusades failed, the Templars were blamed and finally Fillip the Fourth of France, with the aid of Pope Clement the Fifth, who was then based in France UM, they pressed the order and falsely accused them or generally everyone. I think most sources and historians agree that these are false or trumped up charges of blasphemy and heresy, saying that, among other things, they worshiped a severed head called Baha may Uh. There's a whole litany of charges against them. Some of them were burned at the stake, I think fifty six in total, and that included Grandmaster Jacques Delay and others. Other members of the order were absorbed into different militaries and so forth. Now, the name Bappa may here is generally understood to be a French corruption of the name Muhammad, the most of the monstrous templar god. Bapha may is therefore a product of trumped up charges that the templars had converted to the Islamic faith of their enemies, and the French and Papal accusers invoked this fanciful and grotesque degradation of Islam to make their case, because, to be clear, nowhere in Islamic traditions do you find a creature like this. So it's essentially the monster at the heart of a xenophobic conspiracy theory Uh created to slander ones political enemies. In the Middle Ages. Yes, pretty much this, And there's a lot more to the to all of this as well, And certainly when you get into writings about the templars, there's they're added theories, some perhaps worth talking about, some worth skipping over unless you're engaging in just like pure entertainment, I suppose. But but yeah, this seems to be the most straightforward explanation. And it is kind of interesting how in this you have something that is put together as a corruption, as a slander, uh, and over time it kind of takes on life of its own. It becomes used as a symbol of liberation, becomes used as a symbol of rebellion against organized religion, it becomes used as a a part of new religious movements. Even so, it's always fascinating the life of symbols and the life of ideas like this. Well, speaking of rebellion, there is one more biological feature of goats that I wanted to talk about. If you're ready, Robert, or are you ready to get into goat intelligence, let's do it. I think this one is interesting because while I don't think this is a primary reason that the goats would be identified with devils or with the legions of Hell, I do I do think there is some interesting resonances here, and we can come back to that, But basically I was just thinking what is more readily identified with evil than intelligence? Right, because intelligence is often associated with a tendency toward rebellion, or a tendency maybe to think a little too critically about what somebody is telling you to do. And while goats are not generally a species known for how smart they are, there's some evidence that at least in some ways, they might be more clever than we give them credit for, but that it's also a kind of intelligence that is sort of alien to human primate intelligence. So I want to look at a paper by L. D. F. Briefer at All published in Frontiers in Zoology called Goats excel at Learning and Remembering, a highly novel cognitive task, published in ten to explain the context of what the authors were trying to figure out here, They begin by highlighting a couple of competing frameworks for explaining the evolution of higher intelligence. One you might call the social intelligence hypothesis, and the other you might call the ecological competence hypothesis. The social hypothesis argues that the evolution of intelligence and higher cognition is primarily for managing relationships between individuals within a social species. So there are obvious huge survival benefits to being social and working together, and I think there's a very good case to be made that that is what primarily explains the success of humans as a species of animal. But there are also a lot of unique problems that arise when animals congregate in social groups and perform or try to perform any cooperative behaviors. The social hypothesis would say that animals need intelligence in order to get as many benefits as possible from social cooperation and to negate the possible downsides of social cooperation, so to do things like maintain group cohesion and reduce conflict between group members. Meanwhile, the competing ecological competence hypothesis would say that the evolution of intelligence is mainly for uh increasing survival advantage when faced with the problems posed by the environment. And in a sense, the world is a puzzle, and the better you are at solving that puzzle, the more likely you are to survive. So examples would be fine ending ways to extract difficult access nutrition during foraging, remembering the locations of important resources and threats and things like that. And these views would tend to also have implications for the type of learning that we see in different animals, because creatures with social intelligence tend to be capable of social learning. This is a very important concept. Social learning is the ability to learn not only by doing, but to learn by watching others. So when you learn how to do a task by observing someone else doing it, that's social learning, and it's a very important ability. That is arguably what makes it possible for human beings to have technology, civilization, and culture. Animals with the largest brains and the most advanced cognition tend to usually be social animals, and the authors right that quote. The prevalent view today is that intelligent species should excel at social learning. But the authors argue that a lot of this research is focused on primates, which we already know are very smart, they have relatively large brains, and we already know they're very social. But what would happen if we studied this on this question on relatively smaller brained mammals. What if we test this theory on the goat? Goats have a few interesting characteristics. They not only have relatively smaller brains, than primates. Also, the domestication process itself tends to lead to a decrease in brain size when compared to wild ancestors. I mean, domestic animals have fewer puzzles to solve. Let's say, uh, and this could also affect cognition and the author's right quote. Goats possess several features commonly associated with advanced cognition, such as successful colonization of new environments and complex fission fusion societies. To briefly explain both of those, I guess colonization of new environments is fairly self explanatory. You know, goats um they have a pretty adventurous relationship of the natural world, and they can they can spread into areas where it's harder for other animals to survive, but they thrive there, so that they're they're getting something out of the environment that some other animals can't quite get. But the other thing that's interesting is the complex fission fusion societies. This means animals that live together in groups, but they are able to uh, sort of alter those groups in a fluid way and then and then come back together. So an example would be humans live in fission fusion societies We live in groups, but those groups separate off into subgroups. They separate, and they come back together. The groups change sizes, People separate on their own and do different tasks and then rejoin. That's fission fusion. So the authors here tested out goat intelligence and memory on what they call a food box cognitive challenge, a much a puzzle box with a special lever that a goat had to learn how to operate in order to access food, and there were different conditions in this experiment. Wouldn't make a difference to a goat's ability to learn how to use this box if the goat were able to watch another goat opening the box successfully a k a. Social learning and the authors in in the results section right quote, the majority of trained goats nine out of twelve, successfully learned the task quickly, on average within twelve trials at intervals of up to ten months. They solved the task within two minutes, indicating excellent long term memory. The goats did not learn the task faster after observing a demonstrator than if they did not have that opportunity. This indicates that they learned through individual rather than social learning, so goats pretty smart. They learned the task pretty well. They can solve the puzzle most of the time, and they're able to remember that lution pretty well in the long term. Ten months later, you give them another puzzle box, they get into it pretty fast. But the goats did not seem to benefit from watching the struggles of other goats at all, So they did not display signs of social learning. And I think that's kind of interesting because goats are to some degree social they live in herds, but biologically they're not oriented to learn in a cooperative way. They can't learn, at least according to this finding, by watching other goats do the way we can. And the authors say that this would provide some evidence that the evolution of goat cognition is driven more by ecological competence pressure than by social intelligence pressure. So they think, you know, what's pushing goats to uh, to be able to think more efficiently is probably more the stuff about trying to extract solve puzzles in the environment. How do you extract the maximum amount of foraging resources from this area? How do you remember where cashes of food are? How do you remember where threats are? And things like that. Rather than using that intelligence to try to maintain relationships within the group like you might see in chimpanzees. Yeah, now that makes sense. Based on my limited experience with with goat mischief. It tends to be things like you're at a petting zoo and you have a you have a map of the zoo sticking out of your pocket. Somebody decides to sneak that out of your pocket and start eating it. Um, you know, or I've I've spoken this problem solving problem. It's curiosity is pure curiosity? Is it food? I shall investigate? Um? I know. Other situations that have come up of the from some goat farmers that i've I've spoken to in the past have been like the goat wants to find out how to get on top of something and doing that and may find well find its way out of an enclosure. So that sort of thing, right, So clever problem solving within the physical space, but less so within the social arena. So one might be tempted to say that crap, the antisocial goats cast long and sinister shadows. However, I wanted to put another weight on the scale, sort of on the other side of the scale, And this was a study I was looking at by Christian now roth at all published in Biology letters in called goats display audience dependent human directed gazing behavior in a problem solving task. In the background of this one is the observation that, okay, domestication, when you domesticate a wild animal, this clearly affects the animal's brain and its cognition. A domestic dog simply does not think and solve problems the same way its nearest wild relative would. Uh. You know, dog dog thinking is way different than wolf thinking. But how much of this difference is a result of straight domestication and how much is the result of the fact that dogs are domesticated specifically as companions. Yeah? And this, yeah, certainly we get into the whole scenario where we often talk about dogs and cats and other close domesticated animals as we talk about how they look at humans, what do they think humans are? And I know they're they're different interpretations, but I know that it's often said, well, like a cat thinks you may think that you are another cat. I've I've heard, you know, they think you're another kitten, or they think you're its mom, that sort of thing. Dogs, I believe, tend to look at at their humans kind of like their dogs, right, Well, to some extent, I mean you can tell that there is a there's a very natural, inclusive kind of social relationship with dogs to humans, so they acclimatize easily to humans. On on the other hand, there seems to be a kind of special thing with humans, right where like you have these studies where you give a dog a puzzle that it cannot solve, like it can't get the treat out of the puzzle box, And is it going to look at the other dog in the room for help or look at the human for help? It's going to look at the human right, right, And and I don't have any studies to back this up, but I mean this seems to be the case with cats as well, Like the cats will come to the human, they will use their special meal that that is a way of communicating with the humans, as if they are like the mama cat that will fix things. Yeah, but with the goat, Yeah, where do we go with that? Because as we've we've already established like there's a different underlying social dynamic. Right, But what the authors here found, just to read from their abstract, they say, quote, we investigated human directed behavior in an unsolvable problem task in a domestic but non companion species goats. Okay, so they're giving goats sort of like a puzzle box that they can't solve. There, there's clearly an outcome they want, but they can't achieve it on their own. It's not like they, you know, the lever that they could figure out with a few tries in the other experiment. They can't win this game, so the author's right quote. During the test, goats experienced stay forward facing or an away face in person. They gazed toward the forward facing person earlier and for longer, and showed more gaze alterations and a lower latency until the first gaze alteration when the person was forward facing. Our results provide strong evidence for audience dependent, human directed visual orienting behavior in a species that was domesticated primarily for production. And they also say the results quote show similarities with the referential and intentional communicative behavior exhibited by domestic companion animals such as dogs and horses. This indicates the domestication has a much broader impact on hetero specific communication than previously believed. So the study is finding that even though goats were domesticated for production for agriculture, meat, milk, hide, and fur things like that, as opposed to dogs, which were domesticated as companions and helpers. Nevertheless, goats do this dog like thing when they have this unsolvable problem task. They are more likely to look up, for presumably for help, at a human who is looking at them, as opposed to the control of a human that is looking away from them. So this is that this is kind of the impact of the goatherd over over the goat. Now, I don't know exactly what all this adds up to about, you know, how this would affect humans over the years looking at the goats they're familiar with, and whether they would imagine that this goat is having crafty, devilish designs on them or is thinking impure thoughts. But but I did find it interesting. Yeah, like maybe there is a long underlying realization that the goat thinks and behaves differently when we're looking at it as opposed to when we're not looking at it, which reminds me of that ridiculous idea that we folk with Tale that we've brought up in the last episode about how you can't keep tracking the goats not even there all the time. Sometimes it's there, but the rest of the time it's going to hell so that Satan can clean its beard for it. You know what you call that, It's a fission fusion society. Yeah, yeah, it's like, all right, what's your day look like, Carl. Well, I'm gonna eat a bunch of a bunch of grass, I'm gonna climb some rocks and then oh, I've got I've got I've got a one PM with Satan. Gotta get this be taken care of, thank thank now. As previously mentioned, goats, of course, are really good at figuring out how to make use of new environments. And as a result, as a result of that reality and a result of human domestication of the animals, goats are a common sight all over the world. They're one of our oldest domesticated animals. As we discussed in the first episode, They've traveled a long and far with us. And yeah, the goat is especially good at sustaining itself even in places where nothing like the goat has ever lived. And I want to go to a particular place, and and part of this is because I I just physically returned from this place, and so it's it's on my mind a lot, but I want to go to the Galapagos Archipelago. This is a cluster of volcanic islands located five d sixty three miles or n kilometers off the coast of Ecuador. It's a place famous for its biodiversity and for the examples of evolution found there uh as in various species many found nowhere else in the world that have evolved to thrive in isolated environments. And while there is some dispute over whether the Inca ever reached the island, we can be certain that Europeans uh discovered the islands in fifteen thirty five, and outside of Charles Darwin's visit to the island three hundred years later, the history of human contact with the island is has frequently been a bloody one, in tailing at times penal colonies, utopian communities, whalers and pirates. Sailors infamously made off with many of the smaller female galapacost tortoises, which they used to restock their food supplies at these islands, and later these sailors that were visiting the Galapacos Islands would see the islands with food species like goats and pigs, so drop off some goats and pigs, knowing that these are hardy creatures that will find out how to survive, that will breed. And then when you drop back by, we just send some some of some sailors ashore and say, hey, go get me some goat meat. Go get me some pig meat. Can you bring back thirty to fifty feral hogs? Uh? And And given how good these creatures were at at thriving in new environments, and given that these islands had never seen goats or pigs before, yeah, they did quite well. And as you can imagine, this sort of willful introduction of invasive species had a huge negative packed on the environment. In addition to feral goats and pigs, also feral cats feral cattle have along been an issue along with of course rats uh. Cats are of course terrific killers of birds. Pigs will consume hidden eggs including a glob of coast tortoise eggs, I guana eggs, etcetera. Uh, and our problems and other parts of the world as well. But you might well wonder why feral donkeys and especially feral goats would be an issue, Like what ultimately is so destructive about the goat. Well, think back to the browsing dietary habits of the goat that we discussed in the first episode. Again, the goat excels at consuming vegetation and ultimately actually outperforms the giant galapagost tortoise, munching down parts of the plant they would ultimately be inaccessible to the tortoise, and in doing so they also end up loosening the underlying soil. They also, along with donkeys and cattle, can trample eggs uh you know, for the for the eggs as well as just young tortoises, feral pigs, dogs, cats, and black rats can serve as deadly predators and so for these reasons along with with human hunting, we saw the extinction of the Floridana Island subspecies of the Glava Coast tourtise during the mid nineteenth century, and of course all of the glab of coost tortoises have have kind of had an uphill battle uh to to regain successful numbers. Another important thing to keep in mind here and this this reminds me of our discussions of the moa uh, the giant flightless bird in the past. We have to remember that Okay, glab of Coast tortoises are notoriously slow, but they do move around quite a bit, and aided by a slow digestion, they're able to spread seeds across the vast distances. So the glap of cost tortoise isn't just this amazing curiosity to be found on the Glap Coast islands. They're a crucial part of island ecology. They've evolved to thrive within these isolated ecosystems, and those ecosystems have evolved to depend upon them and to uh and to live alongside them. Uh. There are other examples of this as well, like one in particular, you see these very tall to cactus varieties that have evolved to to climb high enough to where they're above the tortoises reach. And then you'll see, you know, all the fruiting parts of the cactus up there, and they'll beat it more like this hard bark on the lower portions of it, very tall cacti. So anyway, we end up with this situation where on we have we have we have islands here that have lots of goats, and the goats are destructive. The goats are in competition with the animals that we want to help, that we want to see survive and have no other place in the world where they can survive, where they can call home. And so this lad to goat removal efforts, a war on goats. And there had been prior goat removal efforts on in other islands, but this was the but this was the largest at this point in history. We're getting into the nineteen nineties here. So according to the Galapa Coos Conservancy quote, prior to nineteen seven, the largest island with a successful goat eradication was Auckland Island in New Zealand, where only one five goats occupied a near four thousand hectares. The next two of the largest islands with successful go to eradications were Lanai in Hawaii and San Clemente Island in California. And uh this in in San Clemente Island they have removed apparently twenty nine thousand goats. So yeah. By the late twentieth century, some real mover movements were being made to eradicate feral populations from the Galapagos Islands. This included the N seven Project Isabella Plan, which aimed to eradicate goats and donkeys from northern Isabella Island, also pigs, goats and donkeys from Santiago Island and goats from Penta Island, And with international funding, they waged a war against the goats and their feral kin and the results are pretty staggering. By two thousand and four, eighteen thousand pigs were removed from Santiago Island. The same year, roughly fifty five thousand goats were eliminated on Isabella. And it's it's interesting when you start, when you start getting into this sort of problem, when you have thousands, tens of thousands of of goats, how do you get rid of them? How do you round them all up? You? Uh? I'm to understand that some of this was done via aerial hunting and some of the pig removal. I think it still goes on today. I'm to understand with with with hunting efforts, but with the goats. They use judas goats to help carry this out, some seven hundred and seventy of them. Now what is a judas goat, you might ask, Well, these are trained goats and in these efforts they are also sterilized goats. Because you don't you're not going to solve your goat problem by releasing seven hundred seven and debreedable goats into the population. But these are trained goats that in they were traditionally used in uh in previous times to lead sheep to slaughter, but they can also be used to lead feral goats to their destruction. So in the case of the galapagost efforts, sterilized goats were used, and uh, yeah, yeah, they were used to help round up many of these goats so that they could be um eliminated. But I think this whole scenario is it's it's kind of a testament to so many of the properties of the goat that we've discussed, their tenacity, their uh, their great ability to thrive in an environment, and in this case, they're too good at it. Again, they just out outperform everything that's already there. Then you have to get rid of them. And how do you how do you wrangle them up? Uh, Well, you've got to use goat against goat. You've you've got to you've got to enlist trader goats or judas goats to go out there and help you lead them in to the kill. I had heard the phrase judas goat before but I don't think I ever knew what that meant. So it's a it's a goat that it takes advantage of the the social hurting behaviors of goats by being trained by humans to lead goats where you want them to go, often too, a place that's not in the interest of the goats themselves, right right, so that they can be rounded up and in this case eliminated and uh. And I believe that they still keep Judas goats around on some of these islands for for monitoring purposes. I wonder, how do you train a goat that other goats really want to follow? Like what is the most followable type of goat? Yeah, I don't know. I didn't go in deep into like the making of a Judas goat, Like how does it come together? I think it since you're you're training an animal to betray it's its own species one instantly, you can't help an anthropomorphize the scenario when you start thinking of various episodes of the outer Limits and imagining like aliens brainwashing human captives so that they'll betray their uh, the human species or something. But I don't think it's quite that complicated. But thank goodness, we can do it. I mean, you think of other problems species like the like the rat. To my knowledge, there's no such thing as a Judas rat. The rats are too clever for that. I suppose You've We've got to resort to, in some cases more basic methods, but also methods that are perhaps just incapable of of solving a large scale rat problem. Al Right, Well, as we reached the end of these three episodes, how do we how has this change the way we feel about goats? It changes nothing for me my allegiances to the goat and to the goat alone as it has always been. Well, obviously, we'd love to hear from everyone out there about all of this. H Yeah, did did Did these episodes change the way you think about goats? Yet? Perhaps? Perhaps not? Uh? And of course we I feel like we we do have listeners who raise goats, or have raised goats, who have been around goats. Um. I'm almost certain of it, if I'm thinking I'm remembering correctly. So if you out there, if you are a goatherd, we would love to hear from you. Let us know what your thoughts are about the way of the goat. Um. So if you've ever worked at a petting zoo, if you have any experience with with goats, uh that that lines up with anything we've discussed here right in, and we'll discuss them on future episodes of Listener Mail. It's also not impossible there'll be another episode concerning goats in the not too distant future, because we were just wrapping up our our work on this and I got a press release from somebody who had like a new study regarding the behavior of goats and rams, and I was like, yeah, I'm like, oh man, maybe I'll have to Maybe we'll have to have them on the show and chat with them. So this may not be the end of the goats in the long run, but it is the end of this three part series, Okay. Do As a reminder, you can find all the episodes of Stuff to Blow Your Mind and the Stuff to Blow Your Mind podcast feed. We are primarily a science podcast with core episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays, with Listener Mail episodes on Mondays. On Wednesday's we do a short form monster fact or artifact episode, and on Friday's we do a little something called Weird House Cinema. That's our time to set aside most serious concerns and just talk about a strange film. Huge thanks as always to our excellent audio producer Seth Nicholas Johnson. If you would like to get in touch with us with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest a topic for the future, or just to say hello, you can email us at contact at stuff to Blow Your Mind dot com. Stuff to Blow Your Minds, production of I Heart Radio. For more podcasts for my heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listening to your favorite shows.