Two Goats Up High Under a Bridge, Would They jump? Would Trump? [Your Monday Morning Story]
MARC SILVER wrote this piece and post it on NPR.org. It made me stop, look and think. How many things something makes us stop and think on any particular day? Particularly on a Monday morning? I hope this natural by chance pictures of the situation of two goats that is really between life or death. The goats on the first pictures are keeping their cool. One might say it was pretty stupid for the goats to be dimwitted to get into that situation. Have anybody ever said that about one of your (and mine)situations? It is not dimwitted of the goats to get into that situation and if you have ever own a goat you know goats live to explore and get into bad situations. To get a pair of goats like I did for pets just because I had space and time to take care of them was dimwitted and stupid of me. But like goats, we all love to explore and I learn mountains, not just about goat behavior but mine. In answer the tittle question of this feature story, Yes He would jump.....just watch him. Would the goats jump?
No one knows why the goats climbed up on the pedestal of a Mahoning River bridge and set out along a narrow beam.
They're not talking. But goats do love to climb and explore, notes goat specialist Susan Schoenian of the University of Maryland College of Agriculture and Natural Resources. So these two goats, who are probably pals (because goats are social animals), escaped from the nearby yard where they lived and went on an adventure.
They deftly walked along the beam with their very small feet. They proceeded about 200 feet. But it turns out they couldn't just keep on walking ahead — there was an obstacle that kept them from moving forward. So they had to turn around and head back the way they came.
The brown goat managed the trick. "He walked out to a concrete pier and somehow got himself turned around," says Todd Tilson, operations manager in the maintenance department of the Pennsylvania Turnpike.
The white goat did not manage to turn around.
That's why, in the photo, you'll see the two goats facing each other.
Tilson reports that the brown goat "kept hitting the white one with its head" to make it walk backward. "It would take one step, two steps back, then stop," he says.
And really, can you blame it? Would you want to walk backward on a beam that is about 8 inches wide and 100 feet above the ground?
Yeah, me neither.
The goats weren't likely to leap off, conjectures Schoenian: "They're not going to jump. That's not part of their behavior to jump off of something. Their desire is to climb."
In their predicament, she sees similarities to human behavior: "Think of a child who climbs out there to explore and gets stuck and is too scared to go any further. And you just kind of shut down even if you could keep going."
The call about the stranded goats came into the Pennsylvania Turnpike at roughly 10 a.m. Tuesday. The son of the owner of the goats said they had been out there 18 hours already.
Clearly, a crane was needed. But the turnpike crane was in use, so the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation stepped in. Steve McCarthy, a civil engineer for bridge inspection with the department, was drafted for the rescue effort. "It was my first goat extraction," he says.
He and a colleague got in the bucket at the end of the long arm of the crane.
Pennsylvania Turnpike spokeswoman Rosanne Placey called the operation "Goat Watch" and remembers "dozens upon dozens" of status reports from turnpike maintenance folks coming in on her phone.
A happy ending wasn't guaranteed. "If they fall off the beam while we're trying to rescue them, it would feel like we did harm to them," Tilson says.
"The initial plan was to try and separate the goats so we could could grab the goat facing the wrong way and turn it around," McCarthy says. But the white goat wasn't cooperating.
"I said, 'I'm going for it,' " he recalls. "I grabbed the goat as tight as I could." And he lifted it into the bucket.
The white goat was deposited on the bridge and handed over to its owner's son. McCarthy then tapped the beam with a pole to encourage the brown goat to make its way back.
Asked about the possible cost of the rescue, Tilson says, "We didn't even calculate it. We were just trying to be a good neighbor and get the goats back safely."
McCarthy is a happy man. "In this day and age, when things can go terribly wrong," he says, "it was great to see things go right."
His success is a testimony to a value that is sometimes lost in our quick-attention-span age: persistence.
"There was no way," he says, "I was letting go of that goat."
Meanwhile, no word on how the goats are faring, but I'm sure they would agree with a classic proverb from Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav: "The whole world is a very narrow bridge; the important thing is not to be afraid."
[pics by npr.org]
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