I saw on a the news tonight a story about a farm up in Green Bay where they have fainting goats. Check out a video of these goats here:

Fainting Goats

I can’t lie. I laughed when I first saw this video. The one that the news showed was a goat coming out of a “goat house” and fell out STIFF. Then, the more I saw it, I started to feel bad for laughing.

Apparently, these myotonic goats refer to a breed characteristic known as myotonia congenita, a condition in which the muscle cells experience prolonged contraction when the goat is startled. The transitory stiffness associated with these contractions can cause the goat to fall down. This is not a true faint, but a muscular phenomenon unrelated to the nervous system. The degree of stiffness varies from goat to goat, with some showing a consistently stiff response and others exhibiting stiffness only rarely.

Anyway, it doesn’t look like it harms the goats… so laughing is appropriate.