I think it's safe to say that we've all seen some Pretty Weird Stuff on this day of days — between the solar eclipse madness and Taylor Swift dropping a random GIF of a snake on her social media, the internet has decidedly worked itself into a frenzy. But I'm here to argue that perhaps the weirdest (and, oddly, the purest?) thing happening on the internet right now is this Facebook Live video of goats during the eclipse, which is airing live to see if goats will, in fact, faint when the sun blots out of the sky.
The video is currently airing on The Washington Post's Facebook page, from Fern Hill Fainters in Cross Plains, Tennessee — one of the few areas lucky enough to be in the path of totality for today's solar eclipse, meaning that they will experience a true total solar eclipse rather than the partial one that most of the country will be looking at today. While it might seem a tad mean to spy on some goats to see if they'll be startled into fainting by some temporary darkness, it is worth noting that goats are generally extra AF, and "faint" at very little provocation — especially when they're young. The "fainting" is actually painless; the fainting goats generally stiffen for about three seconds when they feel a cause for alarm, and adapt as they get older so that they won't fall over when it happens.
Here's the live feed from the farm right now, where they're counting down to see how the goats react:
More to come ...
