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Everybody Poops

For the first time since the beginning of March we only have six goats in the milkers’ pen. Mothra, Lezlie, Lulou, Bella, Rosa, and Maria. All the babies are gone.


Four of them went to the Navajo reservation, four of them went to California. Two of them went to another farm in New Mexico, and five of them have moved to other pens on our farm.


Now, instead of milking time being a time of chaos when babies and mamas all crowd into the space just outside the milking parlor:



It is a time of serenity.


Meanwhile, my contemplation this week is this: goats can poop and run at the same time. I have admired this trait for a while, and now it’s time to look into it.


Of course, goats are prey animals. Prey animals need to be able to poop while running from predators, I guess. Which is why cats and dogs cannot run and poop at the same time (being predators, rather than prey).


There are a lot of amazing things to discover about pooping, though. For instance, researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology have found that nearly all mammals take an average of twelve seconds to poop. (In an earlier study, they learned that nearly all mammals pee for an average of 21 seconds). Elephants, dogs, even sloths take the same amount of time to poop.


The fact that sloths only take twelve seconds to poop is even more astonishing when you realize that they only poop once every five to seven days. And they often poop out one third of their body weight. You can actually see their stomachs shrink when they poop. The sloths throw back their heads and grin when they’re finished.


Unlike other arboreal creatures, sloths climb down to the ground to poop. None of us is going to walk beneath a sloth and get pooped on. (We might get pooped on by monkeys or lemurs, but we should forgive them - they are scattering seeds for the health of the rainforest). The sloth digs a hole on the forest floor and does a little “poop dance” over it. Then returns politely up the tree trunk.


Some animals use their poop as a defense. Sperm whales are known to deploy entire clouds of poop for this purpose. Here’s a link to an article from PRI with photos of a whale unleashing a “poopnado” on a photographer: https://www.pri.org/stories/2015-01-26/canadian-photographer-captures-images-whale-poopnado


Vultures use their own poop as a coolant system. Birds don’t have sweat glands to cool off, so they poop and pee on their own legs, letting the evaporation cool their feet, which lowers their overall temperature.


Caterpillars shoot poop out their butts with such ferocious speed that their poop often lands forty body-lengths away. Researchers at Georgetown University believe that this poop cannon helps keep predators away.


Pandas poop up to 50 pounds per day.


And, finally, there’s Kopi luwak. The world’s most expensive coffee. A single cup can cost $80 in the United States. This coffee is made exclusively from coffee beans which have been eaten (and then pooped back out) by a civet.



Apparently, the digestive juices of the civet remove some of the acidity from your cup of coffee. Hm. You can buy it on Amazon, if you're interested.


In other news, Kat and I seem to be on the verge of achieving something we’ve attempted and failed for months. We wanted to create a soap that had four different versions, one for each season. We started with the idea of making a landscape with a tree and the sun in it, but none of our colors turned out right, and the leaves floated away from the trees.


But now, we have wind soaps. Kat designed a soap with one simple leaf and a swirl. We have finally adapted this idea to make a different version for each season. Here are Autumn and Winter wind:



And here are Spring and Summer - still in the molds. We’ll cut the loaf into thirds and then slice each chunk into bars.



If you’re interested in these, or any others of our soaps, please go to https://www.serenasoaps.com/

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