This enraged goat

And toilets and blood.

The first bit

I’ve had some weird illness this week : a head-in-hands headache that felt like the ones I got for several months when I had long-ish Covid last year, resistant to every painkiller, and a general sense that my body was fighting something and I needed to let it. I’m better now. I woke up two days later and knew I was OK. Yes, I tested for Covid, twice, and was negative, twice.

So that is why this will be quite short and mostly about a goat.

But first, two news stories that I had to pay attention to.

1. The first is about India and Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s claim in 2019 that he had had so many toilets installed that there was no longer any open defecation, anywhere. Well. “Improbable” is one word for that. “Bullshit” is another. Modi has definitely had millions of toilets built, and open defecation — shitting in the open — has definitely been reduced in India. But while I can salute Modi for that, I also know that he is a Hindu ultra-nationalist (that actually doesn’t make sense: actually he is an ultra Hindu-ist) with some extremely dangerous tendencies. And this news story underlines that. Its standfirst: “the Union government has been known for its unhappy relationship with data.” In late July, the government suspended K. S. James, the head of the International Institute for Population Sciences, stating that he had not been recruited properly. Right. Except that the IIPS had published data that rubbished the government’s claim that India is now open-defecation free. From The Wire:

   For example, it showed that India was nowhere close to being open defecation free – a claim that this government, including the Prime Minister, Narendra Modi, often makes. Nineteen percent of households do not use any toilet facility, meaning that they practice open defecation, the NFHS-5 had pointed out. There is not a single state or Union Territory, except for Lakshadweep, where 100% of the population has access to a toilet, it had said.

   And the world’s largest democracy continues to be governed by a man who is unsettlingly the opposite of democratic.

2. In Nepal, another young woman has died because her society still thinks she should sleep in an outdoor hut because she is menstruating and unclean. I wrote about chaupadi (the name is for the hut but has come to mean the practice) first for the much-missed Mosaic Science, a wonderful publication that the Wellcome Institute first generously funded and then summarily closed. Here is the piece on WaterAid’s site. The thing is, chaupadi was made illegal in Nepal in 2005. And untouchability was made illegal in India in 1949. And lots of things are illegal at sea and freely done. Because law requires enforcement, and as this piece about the death by snakebite of 16-year-old Anita Chand makes clear, between law and enforcement is an abyss where snakes and rapists can live.

WaterAid/Poulomi Basu

OK. Now the goat.

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Animal hero of the week : Sergeant Bill

Bill was a goat. Bill was a billy goat. Bill was a mascot for the 5th Infantry Battalion of teh Canadian Expeditionary Force during World War 1. Bill came from Saskatchewan, a Canadian province I know well as my newly remarried mother was invited there with her two young children and two new step-children by some friends who had emigrated. I remember vastness and Skidoos and Dairy Queen ice-cream. Anyway that’s another story. Why an expeditionary force thought having a goat was a good idea has been lost to history. This is the view of the curators of the museum of Broadview, a small town in the prairies:

Tales say a group of Canadian soldiers were riding the rails through Broadview in 1914. They took a liking to Bill and decided to bring him along to the war.

There is more detailed origin story on the government veterans site:

A goat named Bill was pulling a cart in a small town in Saskatchewan when a train, carrying soldiers on their way to fight in the First World War, stopped. The girl who owned Bill let the soldiers take him along as a good luck charm. Mascots were not supposed to go to the front lines, but the soldiers had become very attached to the goat so they hid him in a big crate and took him with them.

So thanks to the selfish whim of a few soldiers, instead of living a peaceful life in the peaceful prairies, Bill spent the next few years in the trenches of northern France. Thanks fellas! He was gassed, shot by shrapnel, and saved at least three lives by pushing soldiers into a trench when he sensed an incoming shell.

The museum says he also helped guard prisoners, as only a goat could. “This enraged goat, they didn’t want to mess with him,” Bell said. “They sat there until the Canadians came along, and the rest is history.”

He was awarded the 1914 star, the Victory Medal and the General Service Medal. He was also court martialled twice, once for eating “his battalion’s personal roll.” This detail comes from Wikipedia and is entirely unenlightening. The whole battalion had one bread bap? Or did Bill eat the roll-call?

He survived the war, was given a fancy blue coat for post-war parades, and lived out the rest of his life in Winnipeg.

Yes. He was stuffed.

You can visit the immobile version of Sergeant Bill at your leisure at Broadview Historical Museum, “the largest small-town museum on the prairies.”

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