Goats going down by excitation

Do you know there are goats who fall on the ground every time they are excited?

Well, there is a special kind of goats with a heritable disorder that leads to a muscular disease. In Latin, we call this disease ‘Myotonia congenita’. Humans and animals have a number of channels in each muscle that provide the transport of certain substances into the muscle. These substances are useful to control the contraction and the relaxation of the muscle. In the case of ‘Myotonia congenita’, these channels are changed and their function is reduced. So, when the goats are very excited, the channels don’t work as they used to and the muscles get in a permanent contraction for about ten seconds.  As result of this contraction, the goats fall on the ground but they don’t pass out.

We can use the goats for various functions like milk production, meat production and as a pet. Typical of the goats with ‘Myotonia congenita’ is that they are very friendly, intelligent and entertaining, so the goats are ideal for the children at home or at the petting zoo. When we compare the meat production of the traditional goats with the meat production of our ‘special’ goats, we see that the traditional goats produce more meat, so we conclude that they are worth more money. Therefore the farmers use our myotonic goats less for meat production.

In some countries, the goats are very important in defending the herd. When a wolf or another predator attacks the group of goats, the myotonic goat falls down by the excitation and the predator will take this goat as a pray. The other goats of the herd can escape easily. Lots of farmers sacrifice the myotonic goat to save the normal goats because they have more value than the ‘Myotonia congenita’ goat.

A heroic but pathetic end of the life of our myotonic goat and also the end of our blog!