BAN #377: The GOAT

[The planetary nebula M 2-9, winds from a dying star. Credit: NASA / ESA / Hubble Legacy Archive / Judy Schmidt]

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Blog Jam

What I’ve recently written on the blog, ICYMI

[Hubble mosaic of the outer planets. From Friday’s article. Credit: NASA, ESA, A. Simon (Goddard Space Flight Center), and M.H. Wong (University of California, Berkeley) and the OPAL team]

Monday 15 November, 2021:  The last moments of Earth's formation seriously scarred the Moon

Tuesday 16 November, 2021: It's galactic cannibalism all the way down

Wednesday 17 November, 2021: Get ready for Thursday night's (almost very nearly total) lunar eclipse!

Thursday 18 November, 2021: So, about that black hole found in a nearby galaxy… yeah, maybe not so much

Friday 19 November, 2021: Hubble takes a series of giant outer planet family portraits

Red in Tooth and Claw

I live in rural Colorado, and we get nature here

One of the stranger quirks of my life is how, in the past few years, I’ve become a goat person.

I mean this literally:

[Sam and me. Credit: Phil Plait]

My wife and daughter watched a lot of baby goat videos a few years back, and somehow this became a trip to a goat breeder the next town over, and then us having four baby goats.

That was a few years ago. Now we have four grown up male goats that we keep as pets. We used to keep them in the barn, but then we decided we wanted them closer to our house so we built a small shed for them where they can sleep overnight protected from coyotes and such as well as stay warm in cold weather (and avoid rain and wind, which they hate).

They’re pretty fun, though a bit of a handful. They’re not what you’d call classically smart, but they are persistent, and certainly know when to take advantage of an opportunity. In other words, they escape their pen a lot. Usually once per year or so they find a small place where the fencing has pulled up a bit, and they roll a natural 20 on create chaos and get out.

They don’t go far, and tend to just wander around the yard eating all the plants my wife has painstakingly cultivated. So we try to be careful as well and inspect their pen often. We’ve talked about rebuilding the fence but yikes, that’s a lot of work.

And then the other day I got a press release in my email for a paper evocatively titled “Boundaryless boundary-objects: Digital fencing of the CyborGoat in rural Norway”. It’s about electronic fencing and how that’s changing the way people in Norway keep goats, and changes in the goats themselves.

We had an “invisible fence” for our dog; a wire runs underground around the area you want to keep the dog in. The dog wears a collar with a sensor on it and if the dog approached the boundary wire the collar makes a high pitched beeping; if the dog crosses the line the collar gives them a mild electric shock. Enough to dissuade but not enough to hurt. It doesn’t take long before the dog learns where the border is; ours never even needed the collar after a short time. This is a far less expensive alternative to actual fencing, and it works pretty well.

This is the same idea, but with goats. In Norway these types of fencing are being used to keep goats corralled. The study in the paper looked at how this is changing the way farmers use goats — instead of for milk or meat or fur they are being used increasingly for landscape management. I’ve watched goats eat blackberry brambles before; we went blackberry picking once and the bloodletting was Wes-Craven-like. The thorns on those bushes are mythic in stature, yet goats eat ‘em up. Same with thistles, which can prick right through leather gloves. Our goats love them.

The innovation here is that the collars don’t need an underground wire; they can be programmed via software and a map. That means it’s easier to keep up (our fence wore kept breaking due to digging, landscape work, etc.) and it can also be changed if needed so the goats can be herded to different areas. Very cool.

The paper notes that this is making it easier to use goats to landscape, and thus is changing how goats are used. But they also point out it changes the goats, too. Ones that take to this new method better are more likely to be allowed to breed, so this could change how the domesticated goat evolves… something that has been ongoing since humans first realized they could breed them to get more milk and meat and fur. It’s an interesting paper.

I don’t expect we will use this system ourselves — I just don’t think I could trust it; our goats have a phenomenally high pain tolerance (they headbutt each other and sometimes inflict a vicious t-bone that will send the victim flying but then he’ll just get right back up again and start looking for food as usual) and I don’t see a shock collar stopping them unless it fries them, and I like our fence giving nominal protection against predators, too. Also the collars are big and our goats are not. Still, it’s an interesting idea and it makes me wonder what it’ll do to the future of outdoor animal keeping. Both to us and the animals.

Another reason I don’t think I’d use it? The logo makes me think electronically outfitting an already satanic animal like a terminator may lead to unintended consequences.

[Do you wish to live… cybernetically? Credit: Nienke Brujining]

Et alia

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