Running with Sherman

by Christopher McDougall

  Most pranksters understand that when you piss off your victim’s family, that’s your cue to either back off or play dumb, but most pranksters aren’t Ken. Ken didn’t settle for snickers; he reached for greatness. His deception had revealed a hidden truth: apparently, a lot of his neighbors had both goats and a competitive streak. If they were motivated enough to pick up the phone, Ken figured, why not give them the race they wanted? He knew the perfect spot too: right down the middle of Falmouth’s only road, all the way to Falmouth’s only Stop sign. Ken put another ad in the paper, and this time it was his own phone that rang off the hook

  “Quite a few people wanted to register,” recalled Ken’s wife, Jean Brandt. “We really had no idea how many people around here had goats, or how far they were willing to come to race them.” At that first race in 1978, Ken didn’t fuss around much with rules; he shoved the adults into one race, kids into another, told them to hold tight to their leashes, and pointed to the Stop sign about forty yards away.

  “Fine people of Falmouth, are you ready?” he shouted.

  “READY!”

  “On your marks….Get set….GOAT!”

  Nancy Sweigart was standing on the sidelines that day. She’d always been a horse person—and if she had a second favorite animal, it would definitely be dogs—but once you see your daughter’s math teacher sprinting her heart out alongside a two-year-old pygmy goat to steal a photo finish from a fifty-three-year-old, four-term state representative who’s lunging so hard he nearly eats asphalt and finishes with his chest heaving like a fireplace bellows but still kneels after the loss and immediately, although he can barely breathe, pets his spotted Boer goat and pants, It’s not your fault, Bobo, it’s not your fault, well…how can you resist?

  “It really took hold of me,” Nancy would tell me. Even though she was thirty years old at the time and couldn’t remember when she’d last moved faster than a walk, the goats inspired her. She got a pygmy of her own, Bubba, and because nobody really has any idea how you’re supposed to teach a goat to race, Nancy invented her own method. “I’d sneak up behind and goose him. He’d take off running and I’d chase him. Then he’d chase me. Then he’d jump on the car and dance around on it till my husband came out and we had to stop.”

  Lest you look down on butt-thumbing and car-hood rave parties as crude and unscientific fitness strategies, consider that Nancy went on to reign as a three-time Grand Champion who never missed a race for fifteen consecutive years. In all that time she never thought of herself as an athlete, but she was having so much fun tearing around the backyard with first Bubba, then Bear, and then Barney that she was putting more hours and sweat equity into her workouts than someone who spent the morning at spin class. When I met her in 2017 at the thirty-ninth running of the goats, she was nearly seventy and introducing her ten-year-old granddaughter, Autumn, to the sport.

  Autumn had borrowed a little white goat named Johnny, but in their first heat, Johnny suddenly stopped after five yards and refused to move. The other children were all flying with their goats to the finish line, while Autumn was stuck in the middle of the racecourse, embarrassed and confused. That’s when Nancy showed Autumn what champions are made of. She pushed through the crowd of spectators, ran to her granddaughter’s side, and scooped Johnny up. With the little goat in her arms, Nancy jogged with Autumn to the finish line as the crowd roared them home.

  “See, everybody loves him!” Nancy told Autumn, who was smiling now. “He’s too cute to race. We’ll just hug him instead.”

  * * *

  —

  Ken Brandt’s little gag grew into a monster. By the fifth year, the side streets around Falmouth Road were too jammed with pickup trucks hunting for parking and kids chasing runaway race partners, so Ken moved the event out of the village and off to a converted horse pasture on the outskirts of town. He added a New Year’s Eve event, the Dropping of the Goat from a thirty-five-foot flagpole, and knighted himself the first Keeper of the Goat—or Scape Goat—entrusted with safeguarding the ceremonial toy ram under lock and key because, as Ken would say, “New Yorkers in Times Square might get jealous and come to kidnap him.”

  With extra space, the race got yeasty and swelled into a local Lollapalooza. Hundreds of cars now snake onto the fairground every September, releasing gangs of children who charge off to the petting zoo, the tractor-cart rides, the homemade steam-engine ice-cream maker, and the Tootsie Roll spitting contest. The U.S. Naval Academy mascot, Bill the Goat, has made an appearance, as has a bewildered young couple from Hawaii who wandered in while visiting for a friend’s wedding and, as part of Ken’s mission to keep things weird, found themselves appointed official finish-line judges for a competition they’d never heard of before.

  Ken had one nagging problem: satisfying demand. First-timers would show up just to have a laugh, and by the end of the day they’d be peppering him with questions about how and where and if they could get a goat of their own. All you have to do is feed a fistful of corn to, say, a floppy-eared Nubian, and you’ll soon realize that just about everything you ever wanted from a dog, you get from a goat. Goats are affectionate, gentle, and playful. They run and jump and play, but don’t bite, bark, or fight. Goats won’t bother your cats or attack the mailman, and they’ll do you a solid and clean out all the poison ivy and ragweed you’ve been meaning to pull. And not to beat up on dogs, but when’s the last time your Golden Lab filled your fridge? Because if you’re willing to get hands-on, you’ll find that goats are easier to milk than cows, yet still give up to a gallon a day of sweet, easy-to-digest (good-bye, lactose intolerance!), cheese-ready goodness.

  Granted, you could accidentally get yourself a Bamboozle, but if you choose wisely and have the residential zoning, a little cud-chewer could be the pet of your dreams. Here’s how loving goats can be: they’re even fans of your pee. A few years ago, rangers at Glacier National Park in Montana were mystified when wild mountain goats stopped fleeing tourists and instead clambered down from the high peaks to hang out near them. Ordinarily it’s hard for tourists to even spot wild goats, but suddenly they were all over the place. Some tourists were even spooked when they stepped into the woods to relieve themselves and found a gang of goats “lurking” there. What were they up to? Goats generally aren’t attracted to human food or close quarters, so they weren’t after snacks or shelter. Maybe they saw humans as protection against bears, wolves, and mountain lions? Could be. So Colorado State University sent a scientist in a bear costume*2 to investigate. That’s right: a scientist. Dressed like Yogi. Chasing goats.

  The professor growled and ran around and discovered that yes, goats actually do stick close to humans when scared. But things got really interesting during his breaks: when the goats were no longer pursued, they sniffed around until they found a rock or tree with a smelly spot, and then got to licking. Goats, the researchers realized, are attracted to human urine. Our super-salty diets make our whiz rich in sodium and minerals, which the goats crave. “It was as if the sound of my zipper was a dinner bell,” reported a hiker who was freaked out by a similar experience on Ingalls Peak in Washington’s Cascade Range. “I didn’t finish, or even start. I zipped my pants back up and briskly walked away.” Too bad, because if he’d been a little more cocksure,*3 he could have witnessed the entire history of animal-human partnerships unfold right before his eyes, a romance built on salt, safety, and chèvre.

  You can’t really blame the guy for performance anxiety, though: goats have a gaze that’s a little too human for comfort. It’s not their eyes, exactly; humans have round pupils, well suited for long-distance hunting, while goats have horizontal slits, giving them a panoramic view of approaching threats. No, it’s the way goats look at us: goats have a rare ability to speak to us with their eyes. Farmers have known this since the dawn of civilization, but only recently have PhDs come up with proof. Goats can communicate with humans in a “referential and intentional way,
” according to Christian Nawroth, who researches animal cognition at Queen Mary University of London. If you present a goat with an unsolvable problem, it won’t just hoist its tail and walk off, the way cats do;*4 instead, it will look you dead in the eye and wordlessly ask for help. Try it yourself: all you need is a goat and a Tupperware of pasta.

  “They go crazy for it,” explained Nawroth, who designed the study. “Some goats like apples, some don’t. I haven’t found any goat that does not like pasta.” Nawroth would open the Tupperware, feed the goat some pasta, then snap the lid tight and watch what happened next. Nearly all the goats reacted the same way: they’d look back and forth from Nawroth to the Tupperware, over and over again, rotating their heads in the same “gazing behavior” you’d use to warn the cops that a burglar was hiding in your closet.

  Human toddlers communicate this way. So do adult dogs and some horses, but they’re a different case: they’ve been selected and bred for centuries to perform complex jobs by our side. With goats, it’s natural; they just seem to believe they can reason with us. If they didn’t, Ken Brandt’s race never would have had a chance. Before the goats are led to the starting line for the first time, very few have ever run alongside a human before. You’d think their first instinct, as prey animals, would be to act like one; you’d expect them to balk, or fight, or flee crazily and tie everyone up in a giant knot of tangled leashes.

  But that’s not what happens. And that’s why the Falmouth Goat Race was such an immediate—and accidental—success. It wasn’t thanks to Ken, who never expected more than a laugh. It was thanks to the goats, who figured out the game and agreed to play along.

  * * *

  —

  Ken has given away so many starter goats over the years that he has to keep rebuilding his own breeding stock. That’s what brought him to our house. Even though we live more than an hour from Falmouth, Ken spotted our ad on craigslist and decided it was worth the drive to give Skeedaddle and Lulu a look. He could tell right away they’d make terrific racers, but he wasn’t happy about the price. Ken handed me a hundred-dollar bill, and when I repeated that the price was only fifty dollars for both, he put his hands over his ears.

  “Make sure you come to the races,” Ken urged, as he was loading our last two goats onto his truck. Before I could point that out, he added, “You don’t have to bring your own. Lots of folks bring extras. You can borrow ’em. Rent ’em. Buy ’em. Yup, I bet you bring a few home. Once you see what goes on, it gets into your blood.”

  “Hell, no,” I muttered to Mika. The second Ken’s truck was off the property we’d be goat-free at last, and I had no intention of ever making that mistake again. We’d do just fine, thank you, with our handful of peaceful, home-loving, fence-fearing sheep, and no amount of goat race glory would ever be worth the headache of chasing another Bamboozle off the road at five in the morning. Still, we were curious to see what a goat festival was like, so when race day rolled around a few months later, Mika went with the girls—

  And came home a changed woman.

  I’d thought we were on the same page with our NeverHorns policy, but that day at Falmouth opened her eyes to a whole new possibility. In one of the races, a little girl was sprinting toward the finish line when her goat suddenly dropped to the ground like it had had a heart attack. The goat lay there, stiff and motionless, while the little girl waited patiently by its side. After a minute or two, the goat stirred and came back to life. Together, they jogged the last few yards to the finish line.

  “That’s some hardcore fainter,” one of the spectators told Mika. There’s an entire breed, known as Tennessee Fainting Goats (or “myotonics”), that passes along a genetic mutation that causes their muscles to lock up when they’re startled. Sheep farmers like them for herd protection; if you put a few fainters out to graze with your valuable ewes, the fainters will drop to the ground whenever a wolf or coyote attacks, giving the sheep time to flee. But for backyard farmers like us, Mika realized, fainters offer two other advantages: they’re easy to catch, and they can’t coil themselves to jump fences. They’d be perfect for milking, Mika urged, and for racing—because, yeah, Ken was right: go to Falmouth once and you’ll be hooked for life.

  A few months later, the girls found a long red string tied to the bottom of our Christmas tree. They followed it across the living room, out the back door, and through the backyard to the garden shed, where two young fainting goats were waiting. They were snow white and only a few months old, and for reasons I no longer recall but completely endorse, we named them Chili Dog and Awesome Blossom.

  I’d found them in October at a small farm in nearby Rising Sun, Maryland, and the farmer agreed to hold them for me until I could sneak them home and into the shed on Christmas Eve. Chili was such a timid little tyke, I had to put him on the front seat of the truck with me so Awesome wouldn’t bully him on the drive home. Since then, he’s more than grown into his own, sprouting a magnificent pair of curvy horns that he’s not shy about thumping into any creature in the barnyard that gives him a hard time.

  Mika was right and wrong about the fainters: they couldn’t jump, but every once in a while they’d get a taste for open spaces and Houdini their way out from under the tiniest gap beneath the fence. I could forgive them, though, because they really were perfect for the kids to race. We became Falmouth regulars, and no matter how hectic things got on race day, Ken was always easy to spot. Even at age seventy-five, he liked to arrive early so he could park right next to the starting line and be on hand to help when the youngest children were nervously leading their goats to the line for the very first time. Ken would welcome the crowd with his signature greeting—“Fine people of Falmouth! Are you ready?”—and then hand the microphone to his grandson, Nico, who’d taken over responsibility for play-by-play color commentary.

  In 2016, something odd happened. For the first time in nearly forty years, race day arrived but Ken didn’t. When we’d met Ken a few years earlier, he’d never let on that he was battling cancer. He fought it hard for twelve years, long enough for him to handpick the goats that a fourth generation of Brandts would run with. He hoped to see them race at the fortieth anniversary, but he didn’t make it. This time, the fine people of Falmouth weren’t ready.

  * * *

  —

  Ken would never know the favor he’d done for Sherman. If it hadn’t been for Ken and his Go Goats! attitude, Sherman wouldn’t have had a goofy brown friend waiting to nuzzle and reassure him after he was rescued. You can draw a line directly from Ken’s arrival at our house, to Chili, to Lawrence. But this morning, we were circling that line back to Chili. Overnight, my dozing brain had hit on something my waking brain had been too impatient to grasp: Anything I demanded from Sherman would never happen. Anything I offered had a chance. The more I tried to boss him around, the more he would resist. There was no way I was going to out-donkey a donkey, especially not a damaged one like Sherman. Years of captivity had seasoned him into a hardened resistance fighter who could outsmart, outlast, and outmaneuver anything I threw at him. For Donkey Tao to work, I couldn’t push; Sherman had to pull.

  But that didn’t mean I couldn’t dangle a carrot. Or in this case, some Chili.

  I found Chili grazing behind the brown barn. He tried to bolt when he saw me approaching with a leash, but his back legs seized up, fainting-goat-style, and I was able to harness him before he regained full power. I led him back toward Mika, who was doing her best to control Sherman and Lawrence at the same time. I squeezed Chili past them and out through the gate, then went back for Sherman. Sherman followed Chili without a problem, probably because he hadn’t yet realized that Lawrence was playing no part in this operation.

  Chili had Falmouth experience,*5 so he’d become a good walk partner. Five minutes of walking with Lawrence, on the other hand, could leave you facedown on the pavement or wrapped in your leash tight as a mummy. Lovable as he is, Lawren
ce is a hyperkinetic freak, and the world is far too full of marvels and joys for him to ever do anything except lunge and swerve toward whatever catches his eye. Focus and impulse control aren’t among Lawrence’s strengths, or even his weaknesses. They’re not even trace elements in his atomic matter. That’s why we’d never brought him to the goat races; sure, he’d be fast, but whether that speed would take him toward the finish line or some poor kid’s corn dog, we had no way of knowing—or controlling.

  Mika held Lawrence back as Sherman went through the gate, then quietly turned Lawrence loose and shooed him away. Luckily, Lawrence spotted some lambs butting heads in the neighboring meadow and charged off to join them before Sherman noticed he was gone. Slowly, almost casually, Mika led Chili toward the road. I stayed back, holding my breath, feeding out rope to see what Sherman would do.

  Suddenly, Sherman sensed he was alone. His head jerked up and began swiveling. In the distance, he could see Lawrence, off thumping noggins. Close at hand was Chili, just starting to walk away. Sherman paused, then began following Chili. When he reached the asphalt, he kept right on going, just like yesterday.

  “See if you can speed Chili up when you reach that puddle,” I called out to Mika.

  “What puddle?” she said, looking around. She hadn’t been with us yesterday, so she couldn’t quite comprehend just how barely a puddle the Barely-a-Puddle of Doom really was.