A 35-year-old spent a year creating prosthetic ‘goat legs’ to be able to comfortably wander around the Alps on all fours.
Thomas Thwaites quitted London and became a goat in Switzerland after realizing how stressful his life was. He even created an artificial stomach that would enable him to blend in and ‘eat grass’, as Daily Mail reports.
Thwaites said: ‘When I first had the idea a lot of people called me crazy, but I was fed up with my life anyway and I needed a break. I was jobless and I had a lot of personal problems, and I found everyday life so stressful.’
He, then, applied for a university grant to study goat psychology and tracked down a goatherd in the village of Wolfenschiessen in Switzerland who accepted to have Thwaites living with his animals.
Thwaites’ prosthetic ‘goat legs’ were designed with the help of a clinic in Manchester which helps people who have suffered amputations.
The fake stomach, that was created with experts from the University of Aberystwyth, was strapped onto his waist and helped him to secretly spit chewed up grass inside.
‘I could then strap this bag to my torso and spit chewed up grass into one opening and suck the cultured microbes and volatile fatty acids out another opening like a milkshake, so I can digest them in my true stomach and live off grass in the Alps like a goat,’ he said.
‘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.
‘The one other thing I reckon I found is that goats are better people. They live much more in the moment than we do, and show us that we really do need to learn to be a bit more relaxed about life.’
Thwaites has written a book about his time on the mountain: ‘GoatMan: How I Took a Holiday from Being Human’.