From the Vault: Oh Goat, You Devil - Part 3

a wonderful animal, and the monic realm of sin and flames. Now, in previous episodes, we've talked about the basic biology of the goat as 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 goat man devils, possibly 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 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. 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 Azazel, and 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 end of the age, he will separate the righteous from the unrighteous and what's the image used 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 features of goat biology that people of centuries past might possibly have interpreted as devilish or sinful in one way 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.

Oh gentle friend, I know not what your age may be, 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.

have the beard and so forth. But yeah, this is a neat little poem summing up the independent and relatable spirit of the goat.

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 Service, 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. 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 instead of a round 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 eye 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 evolution tionary 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 bring up the

same paper again. This was by Martin S. Banks at All, published in the journal Science Advances in twenty fifteen, 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 niche is, 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 pounce 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 exact medium range pounds.

But herbivores prey animals are more likely to have horizontal pupils like the goat. To quote from the study, horizontally elongated pupils create 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 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 evolutionary history of goats occupying mountains and craggy landscapes. 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 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 elongate 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 often 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 pupil stand out, which makes it look more noticeably alien, at least to me interesting.

But taking all that we've discussed here into the scenario, it's like, Okay, if we have some sort of god or god like being or anti god taking on the head and eyes of a goat, well, in a way it seems more fitting. It's like, 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.

really cool contact lenses. So we'll have various there's so many treatments of this where various fallen angels and so forth will have all black eyes or maybe all white eyes, and that tends to note some sort of strangeness of vision as well.

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 shortly after we recorded a weird House cinema episode on the film The Devil Rides Out, which prominently features this satanic goat man appearing at a

black mass. And so this entity of Baphame or the Goat of Mendes is essentially a Western occultist distortion of a Greek interpretation of the god of Egypt, the Egyptian god known as beneb Jujet that was worshiped in Mendays, which is the Greek name for an ancient Egyptian city

named Jadet, also known today as Tel el 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 Western traditions. So already I know this sounds like some sort of a 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 Europe and North Africa. So here's a quote from Herotodus 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 Mendicians 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 Hellenese 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 Mendisians then reverence all goats, and the males more than the females. And the goatherds

too have greater honor than other herdsmen. 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 Mendis.

of mis interpretation 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 to the ancient Egyptians, so they were often regarded as manifestations of other deities such as Osiris, and Pinch writes quote, the sexual aspect of

occult admindis made it particularly disliked by early Christians. Benetjedet'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.

and Ritual of High Magic. And as with any many examples of divine and occult imagery, the image of Baphame 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 is a goat being with the upper body of sometimes a female but sometimes like half the chest is female,

halfs 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.

See they were This organization was intended to serve 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 warriors became important, managing the movement of funds across vast distances 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 Philip the Fourth of France, with the aid of Pope Clement the Fifth, who was then based in France, they suppressed the order and falsely accused them, or generally every 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 Bahamet and 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 Grand Master Jacques de Malay and others. Other members of the order were absorbed into different militaries and so forth. Now the name Bahame here is generally understood

be a French corruption of the name Muhammad. The monstrous templar god Baphomet 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.

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, and over time it kind of takes on life of its own. It becomes used as a symbol of liberation, it becomes used as a symbol of a rebellion against organized religion, it becomes used as a part of new religious movements. Even so, it's always fascinating the life of symbols and the life of ideas like this.

just thinking, what is more 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 LEDF. Briefer at All published in Frontiers in Zoology called Goats excel at Learning and Remembering, a highly novel cognitive task, published in twenty fourteen 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 increasing survival advantage when faced with the problems posed by the environment. 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 finding ways to extract difficult to 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, and this could also affect cognition and the author's write 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. I mean, you know goats that have a pretty adventurous relationship with 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 sort of alter those groups in a fluid way 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 pretty 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. Would it 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 aka social learning? And the authors in their result 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 saw 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 learn the task pretty well, they can solve the puzzle most of the time, and they're able to remember that solution pretty well in the long term. Ten months later, he 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 are 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 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 forging resources from this area? How do you remember where caches 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.

other side of the scale. And this was a study I was looking at by Christian Nowroth at All published in Biology Letters in twenty sixteen called goats display audience dependent human directed gazing behavior in a problem solving task. And 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 you know, 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.

or they think you're its mom, that sort of thing. Dogs, I believe, tend to look at their humans kind of like their dogs.

the other experiment. They can't win this game, so the author's write quote. During the test goats experienced a forward facing or an away facing 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 the species that was domesticated primarily for production. And they also say their results quote show similarities with the referential and intentional communicative behavior exhibited by domestic companion animals such as do horses. This indicates the domestication has a

much broader impact on heterospecific 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.

all over the world. They're one of our oldest domesticated animals. As we discussed in the first episode, They've traveled 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 part of this is because I just physically return from this place, and so 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 hundred and sixty three miles or nine hundred and six kilometers off the coast of Ecuador. It's a place famous for its biodiversity and for the examples of evolution found there 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 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 has frequently been a bloody one, entailing at times penal colonies,

utopian communities, whalers and pirates. Sailors infamously made off with many of the smaller female Galapagos tortoises, which they used to restock their food supplies of these islands, and later these sailors that were visiting the Galapagos 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 of some sailors ashore and say, hey, go get me some goat meat. Go get me some pig meat.

Pigs will consume hidden eggs, including Glopaco's tortoise eggs, iguana eggs, etc. And our problems in 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? Yeah, 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 Galapagos tortoise, munching down parts of the plant that 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 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 human hunting, we saw the extinction of the Floriana Island subspecies of the Glapagos tortoise during the mid nineteenth century, and of course all of the Galapagos tortoises have kind of had an uphill battle to regain

successful numbers. Another important thing to keep in mind here, and this reminds me of our discussions of the moa, the giant flightless bird in the past. We have to remember that, okay, Glapagos 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 vast distances. So the Galapagos tortoise isn't just this amazing curiosity to be found on the Glapcos 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 live alongside them. There are other examples of this as well, like one in particular, you see these very tall cactus varieties that have evolved to climb high enough to where they're above the tortoise's reach, and then you'll see, you know, all the fruiting parts of the cactus up there, and they'll be more like this hard bark on the

lower portions of it, a very tall cacti. So, anyway, we end up with this situation where on 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 led to goat removal efforts, a war

on goats. And there had been prior goat removal efforts in other islands, but this was the largest at this point in history. We're getting into the nineteen nineties here, So according to the Galapagos Conservancy quote, prior to nineteen ninety seven, the largest island with a successful goat eradication was Auckland Island in New Zealand, where only one hundred and five goats occupied a mere four thousand hectares. The next two the largest islands with successful goat eradications were

Lenai in Hawaii and San Clemente Island in California. And this and San Clemente Island they removed apparently twenty nine thousand goats.

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 interesting when you start, when you start getting into this sort of problem. When you have thousands, tens of thousands of goats, how do you get rid of them? How do you round them all up? I'm to understand 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 hunting efforts, but with the goats, they used 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 and seventy greatable goats into the population.

But these are trained goats that there were traditionally used 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 Galapagos efforts, sterilized goats were used. And yeah, yeah, they were used to help round up many of these goats so that they could

be eliminated. But I think this whole scenario is it's kind of a testament to so many of the properties of the goat that we've discussed, their tenacity, their great ability to thrive in an environment, and in this case, they're too good at it. Again, they just outperform everything that's already there. Then you have to get rid of them. And how do you wrangle them up? Well, you've got

to use goat against goat. 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.

But thank goodness, we can do it. I mean, you think of other problems species like the rat. To my knowledge, there's no such thing as a Judas rat. The rats are too clever for that. I suppose we've got to resort to, in some cases more basic methods, but also methods that are perhaps just incapable of solving a large scale rat problem. All right, Well, as we reach the end of these three episodes, how does this change the way we feel about goats?

the goat. So, if you've ever worked at a petting zoo, if you have any experience with goats, the 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 work on this and I got a press release from somebody who had it like a new study regarding the behavior of goats and rams, and it's 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. Oki Dokie 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 and Mondays. On Wednesdays we do a short form monster fact or artifact episode, and on Fridays 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.