Chris and Brooke Gardner of Mount Auburn, Iowa, raise goats — but not your garden-variety goats.
According to the Gazette, based in Cedar Rapids, the couple raises both pygmy and “fainting” goats, a breed so named because they collapse under almost any sort of stress. The newspaper reports that neighbours of the farm enjoy rankling the herd, “honking their car horns to watch the goats keel over from fright as their defence mechanism.”
The hereditary condition, known as myotonia congenita, causes the muscles of afflicted goats to freeze for about 10 seconds when the animal is startled. While painless to the breed, the reaction causes younger goats to stiffen and fall over even though they retain full consciousness.
Brooke Gardner says the farm has largely switched from breeding pygmy goats, which like to jump on to people’s cars, to the fainting variety, also known as Nervous Goats, Stiff-leg Goats and Tennessee Fainting Goats.
“I like fainters a lot more,” she says. “You don’t have to worry about them.”
reports that Lynn Keesler was driving a rental car through Burley, Idaho and couldn’t locate her hotel. Cassia County Undersheriff George Warrell says the woman received directions from a police officer, but she mistakenly headed into a field, where her car became trapped in a drainage pond.
