A study of the traveling petting zoo finds conversation left the fairgrounds before the animals did
Baby goats from the Farm Adventures petting zoo tested positive for rabies in North Carolina. A study of fourteen counties finds spoken English left with them. The weather group still has nouns.
Baby goats from Farm Adventures have tested positive for rabies and have retired the spoken sentence across North Carolina. The traveling petting zoo showed those animals at fairs from late July through late August and left a quiet that no one booked.
I ran the study that counted leftover words after news of the Farm Adventures goats moved through the state. We used fourteen counties and a comparison group, which is the people who do not hear the thing you are testing. They got a quiet weather report and nothing else.
Each person in the goat group was asked to describe a barn. A barn holds hay, animals, and on a good day one working latch. They managed fourteen words. Then they managed none. We offered water and a second try. They produced a sound that was not a word and not a bleat. The chance this was a fluke is called a p-value. A p-value is the odds a result is just luck. Luck clocked out. The sample size was adequate. It was not.
Health offices asked anyone who met the baby goats to alert a local department, a step already reported by the New York Times and Fox News. That request is ordinary public work. Our result is not, and I wish it were smaller.
Sable Orr keeps the calendar for Farm Adventures and spoke in the only complete sentence we collected from the company this week. She said the goats had finished every date they were paid to finish and that the company does not keep extra sentences in the truck.
The goats were on time. Language was late. We do not refund weather.
The last usable sentence arrived on Sunday, according to Prudence Kemp, who stamps paper at a county health desk. It named a goat and refused to name a person, which she called a filing success. She put the stamp down hard and went to lunch.
Along the fence at county fairs, visitors kept reaching for a rail that did not reach back, said Miles Harlan. He called the empty gesture a breakthrough in human judgment. Then he yawned into his sleeve and asked if we were done.
We do not claim the goats taught rabies to grammar. Rabies is a virus, and a virus is a small infectious thing that does not keep a calendar. Grammar is only a habit, and the habit failed in the goat group while the weather group kept every noun they came in with.
Farm Adventures has not mailed a replacement sentence, and North Carolina still has weather on the usual days, which continues to arrive without a study. The fourteen leftover words sit in a drawer and help no one, so I filed the paper and went home.
