A Geep Can't Make Up Its Mind

This will be my 800th post... WHOA.

.... So when we were in Italy, you want to know what Panther tried from a street vendor?

A HORSE PANINI.

Ummm... NOT ok. I didn't even want him to bring it into the van with us. He ate horse meat and he LIKED it. And Gordon took a bite, and HE liked it. It's a good thing James didn't take a bite... that might have ended in divorce.

;)

Culturally... if that's your thing... of course. By all means. But I would eat my own shoe before I would eat a horse... or a dog....


On our way our to Catania - the night of the horse meat incident - we had a nice drive through the Sicilian countryside. Through the miles and miles of orange groves, there were also fields of what I mistakenly thought were goats.

Nope.

They were geep. A sheep/goat combo. For whatever reason geep are the thing around those parts. Their wool isn't useful, but their milk is. And the geep tend to run out into the road a lot - and if you hit one you owe the farmer a lot of money. And somehow... that geep is ALWAYS female, and she's ALWAYS pregnant with two babies (which means you owe for 3 geep in one).

I have done a bit of reading because I wanted to know if they are actually a combination of a sheep and a goat. Technically a geep is what is known as a chimera - which is produced by combining the embryos of a goat and a sheep - NOT by them mating. (That would be a sheep-goat hybrid... TOTALLY different according to wikipedia). I assume since they were calling them geep in Sigonella - they are the chimera, but I don't know for sure.

Here's something really interesting off wiki:
"The resulting creature was a mosaic of goat and sheep tissue. The parts that grew from the sheep embryo were woolly. Those that grew from the goat embryo were hairy."

So the poor thing can't make up it's mind whether it's woolly or hairy:


You may be snoozing by this point, but I found it interesting - especially being from Mule Town USA. Mules are the result of a donkey and horse mating and all male mules are infertile and MOST female mules are infertile... but a geep can reproduce. But it passes on EITHER sheep or goat genes - " depending on whether its reproductive organs were formed from the goat embryo or from the sheep embryo"

Fascinating. Maybe only to me... but hey. Panther likes horse meat. To each his own!

Peace. Love. Fiddle.
~natalie