A man has been describing how he was so stressed with his daily life that he decided to live as a goat.
Known as “goat man”, Thomas Thwaites, has written about his unusual lifestyle choice in a book, GoatMan: How I Took A Holiday From Being a Human .
Speaking to BBC Radio 4’s Today Programme, the 34-year-old said he made the decision after dog-sitting his niece’s “happy, joyous” dog, when he thought “wouldn’t it be nice to just have a break from all of this stress”.
He said he remembered thinking as a child that if he were a cat, he wouldn’t have to go to school.
“But rather than just letting my childish wishes go, I wrote to the Wellcome Trust, and they gave me a small arts award, which called by bluff, I suppose,” he said.
“It became an investigation into how close we can come to fulfilling this ancient human dream. I did a bit of research and you can easily find all the cave paintings [depicting] half-human and half-beast.”
After receiving the funding, Mr Thwaites went through a number of prototypes, including a wooden structure, but ended up using prosthetic limbs and walking in a field with goats.
“I went to a goat farm in the Alps and had some prosthetics made by a doctor at the University of Salford prosthetics clinic, including prosthetic hooves and prosthetic back legs,” he said.
He said he even attempted give his stomach similar digestive qualities to those of a goat by eating grass.
Mr Thwaites added that he would recommend being a goat, describing it as a “special kind of time”.
He lasted three days on the goat farm, before he left and crossed the Alps, and now is happily back to normal human life.
It was not the first time Mr Thwaites has embarked on an extraordinary experiment.
In 2009, after being inspired by Douglas Adam’s Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, where Arthur Dent crash-lands on to a primitive planet and is unable to build a toaster, replicating his modern world, he set out to do just that.
Mr Thwaites said the project took nine months and £1,200 to complete.
