A Half-Goat Named Toast
In July of 2000, a journalist filed a fluffy science story with the BBC, describing the birth and behavior of a rare goat-sheep hybrid in Botswana; such hybrids normally die in utero, so the appearance of this apparently healthy specimen attracted international scientific attention. The story doesn’t include an official name for the animal, though it mentions that he received the nickname “Bemya,” which the BBC article translates as “rapist,” for his tendency to attempt to mate with both ewes and does, whether or not they were in heat.
Sometime during the publication process, someone at the BBC wrote a headline for their article about the animal and used a common figure of speech: “‘Funny creature’ toast of Botswana.” In 2006, it seems that someone read the article, interpreted the headline literally, and created a Wikipedia page about the animal. The page currently begins:
The “Toast of Botswana” is the name of an unusual case of a sheep-goat hybrid that was reported by veterinarians in Botswana in 2000. The animal was born naturally from the mating of a female goat with a male sheep that were kept together.
Its sole citation? The BBC article, listed by its title.
A Google search for “Toast of Botswana” currently yields about 2,800 results, over 2,000 of which seem to be about a hybrid animal (or, alternately, a kind of hybrid) named “Toast.” Many of the listed pages are copies of the Wikipedia article being scraped and republished as Googlebait, but many feature “original content,” mostly in the form of lists of odd animals or funny-sounding terms for hybrid creatures.
And none of the writers, editors, Wikipedians, or bloggers who published content about the half-goat with the funny name paused to consider whether it was worth checking to make sure that The Toast of Botswana was, in fact, a name.
As a symbol for our particular editorial moment, we could do worse.
