Man fed up with modern life chooses to live like a goat in the mountains

A 35-year-old British man was so fed up with the rat race that he quit living in London and went to Switzerland – to live like a goat. Thomas Thwaites spent a year making special prosthetic ‘goat legs’ that would enable him to explore the Alps just like goats do – on all fours – with even an artificial stomach that would allow him to ‘eat grass’.

Once in the mountains, Thwaites was not only able to live among the mountain animals but also made a good goat friend who followed him around everywhere. “She would muzzle me with her nose and like to have me close. The goatherd told me at the end that the herd had accepted me as one of their number - it was a great feeling,” he told the Daily Mail.

In order to prepare himself to live the ‘goat life’, Thwaites applied for a university grant to study goat psychology and searched for a goatherd in the village of Wolfenschiessen in Switzerland who would let him hang out with his animals whenever they would be taken to their summer pasture.

Thwaites got his prosthetic ‘goat legs’ designed with the help of a clinic in Manchester which assists people who have had amputations. His fake goat stomach, which was created with experts from the University of Aberystwyth, was fixed onto his waist and allowed him to secretly spit chewed up grass inside without letting his mountain friends know.

So what lessons did he learn from his experience of living as a goat in the Swiss Alps? “I learned something important, and that is that even goats have a hard life and need to fight for their existence. Every day was tough, and that is something that just is part of being alive,” he says. He added that goats were better than humans as they lived much more in the moment than we do and can teach us a thing or two about living a relaxed life. Thwaites has now even finished writing a book about his novel experiment titled 'GoatMan: How I Took a Holiday from Being Human'.

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