In northern Afghanistan, here are goats, horses, men and dusty plains, and they have been there ever since Genghis Khan and his Mongol horde swept into the neighborhood in the 13th century. Their game, then, is simple. Men on horseback grab a goat from a chalk circle, carry it around a pole and drop it into another circle. No downs or innings. Sometimes there are teams, and sometimes there aren't. Sometimes the field is 200 meters by 200 meters, and sometimes it isn't. And the goat might be a calf, but it's always dead, with its head and hooves cut off.
Grab the goat, bring it around the pole and put it in the circle.
That's buzkashi.
posted by nevercalm
on Sep 24, 2011 -
29 comments
Towns everywhere are looking for ways to cut costs during the current economic downturn. Andover, Mass has come up with one interesting solution,
goats.
Andover is not the only place goats are being used in the place of weed wackers and lawn mowers.
Google is also going with goats, citing the reduction in pollution and the cuteness factor. Possibly they may also attempt to lighten the mood in the office, by mixing in some
fainting goats.
posted by meta87
on Nov 2, 2009 -
34 comments
In 2000, the Spanish
Pyrenean Ibex (a type of mountain goat) went extinct. In early 2009 it was
brought back to life, the first time an extinct species has been "successfully" cloned. The newborn bucardo died of respiratory failure minutes after birth, setting a second extinction record.
posted by stbalbach
on Feb 15, 2009 -
34 comments
Were you psychologically damaged at a petting zoo?.
The Childhood Goat Trauma Foundation was created in 1982 by a small group that originally came together as an informal support group for problems that were the result of traumatic experiences at petting zoos as children. This group realized that there were many others out there who were afraid to come forward with their horrific stories and wanted to find some way to help as many people as they could. The Childhood Goat Trauma Foundation is the result of their dream.
posted by amyms
on Jul 30, 2007 -
130 comments
They're farther along than I thought... You may have heard about Nexia Biotechnology, who have put spider genes into goats to get milk with spider silk protein in it. I thought it was still in the research phase, but Nexia have apparently
gone to market with the stuff. They've signed agreements with several manufacturers to produce spider silk protein-based products such as lightweight ballistic armor (like Kevlar, only lighter and non-toxic to produce) for the armed forces and super-strong sutures and prosthetic ligaments for medical supply companies.
posted by RylandDotNet
on Jul 21, 2002 -
7 comments
Got Silk. ''Oh, it's not that weird,'' Nexia's president and C.E.O., Jeffrey D. Turner, says as we walk around the pens, being nibbled constantly by aroused goats. ''What we're doing here is ingeniously simple,'' he says. ''We take a single gene from a golden orb-weaving spider and put it into a goat egg. The idea is to make the goat secrete spider silk into its milk.''
posted by srboisvert
on Jun 16, 2002 -
18 comments
Valentine's Day may be a remant of the ancient Roman festival of
Lupercalia, in which "young men who were naked except for the skins of goats that had been sacrificed this day, ran from the Lupercal around the bounds of the Palatine . . . striking the women they met with strips of goat skin, to promote fertility."
This factoid resists my every attempt to add further comment.
posted by jbushnell
on Feb 14, 2001 -
3 comments
