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As this firm-uddered doe squatted to give birth, little did she know the quivering quadruped slipping from her tender loins was to be a star in 2013. But it was to be so: goats are fast becoming the new cats within internet culture circles.
Cats have held the position of "internet's favourite animal" for perhaps too many years now. It was only a matter of time before another unwitting beast was inadvertently catapulted into memetic stardom, and it looks like goats have stepped up to the challenge, cloven hooves akimbo and ready for their share of the takings.
The current bubbling craze arguably started with the YouTube video "Funny goats screaming like humans", uploaded to YouTube in February.
Since then, Google searches for "goats" have more than doubled.
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Then videos of humans screaming like goats screaming like humans reared its head. Today, people are sharing photos of goats "for no reason", and a ten-minute compilation video -- "The Ultimate Goat Edition Supercut" -- has currently clocked up nearly 4,500,000 views. It's not the only one, either.
Goats -- particular those who scream like a banshee -- would next become mashed-up into pop songs from the likes of Taylor Swift and (my personal favourite) Whitney Houston. Simply type "goat edition" into YouTube and you'll be rewarded with any number of these remixes, along with compilation videos of the best.
Perhaps we should've seen it coming. Websites promoting goat-based humour, such as Lolgoats.net, have existed for sometime; video clips of fainting goats did the rounds on YouTube years ago, which signalled at least a moderate interest in goat culture on the part of idle web surfers.
Now would be an opportune time to capitalise on the craze. For example, we don't yet have a popular goat-based comic strip; we don't have a goat equivalent of Maru or Grumpy Cat; there's no hyper-popular webcam hooked up to a goat farm and there's no tabletop book of the funniest goat memes to date.
But mark my words: there will be. Officially the year of the goat is, per the Chinese zodiac, a couple of years away. But on the unwritten zodiac of memes, that year is already upon us.
Image: Shutterstock
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
