A U.K. man wanted to see if the grass was greener on the other side — literally.
Thomas Thwaites decided to temporarily trade in living the stressful life of a human to see if living as a goat in the Swiss mountains would be an improvement.
“When I first had the idea, a lot of people called me crazy but I was fed up with my life and I needed a break. I was jobless and I had a lot of personal problems, and I found everyday life so stressful,” Thwaites told the Daily Mail.
While on a walk with a friend and his dog, he “noticed that the dog just seemed really happy about life, without any worries, and I thought to myself it would be really great to be you for a day.”
A dog’s life was good, except Thwaites didn’t want to eat meat, so he considered living as other species, including elephants, but realized the giant creatures “seem to have the same problems we do; they get sad, they get upset, and they can even suffer from post-traumatic stress. That was exactly the sort of thing I was trying to get away from.”
Goats, on the other hand, seemed to have a more leisurely life, so he applied for a university grant to study goat psychology.
To live as a four-legged creature, the researcher enlisted the help of a prosthetics clinic in Manchester to create “goat legs” so he could bounce around the Alps on all fours, while experts from the University of Aberystwyth designed a goat’s “stomach,” which he strapped onto his waist.
“I could strap this bag to my torso and spit chewed-up grass into one opening and suck the cultured microbes and volatile fatty acids out another opening like a milkshake, so I could digest them in my true stomach and live off grass in the Alps like a goat,” he told the outlet.
Thwaites, who chronicled his adventures in the 2016 bookGoatMan: How I Took A Holiday From Being Human, struggled with having to eat grass and the slope caused him to constantly fall over.
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“Also the goats didn’t seem to like me very much, sometimes I thought they were really going to try and attack me. And they have particularly dangerous horns,” he noted.
“But I later realized that they were just letting me know there was a hierarchy, and I should know my place.”
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Thwaites said that by the end of his experiment, one of his takeaways was that “goats are better people. They live much more in the moment than we do, and show us that we really do need to learn to be a bit more relaxed about life.”
While his time as a goat is over, he acknowledged that the animals do indeed “have a hard life and need to fight for their existence.”
He added: “Every day was tough, and that is something that just is part of being alive.”