Stuff You Should Know - That Dang-old Goat Fell Over

Episode Date: March 24, 2011

Due to a condition known as Thomsen's disease, the muscles of fainting goats tense up whenever the animal is startled. In this episode, Josh and Chuck break down the science behind this bizarre condition. Tune in and learn more. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Flooring contractors agree. When looking for the best to care for hardwood floors, use Bona Hardwood Floor Cleaner. The residue-free, fast drying solution is specially designed for hardwood floors, delivering the safe and effective clean you trust. Bona Hardwood Floor Cleaner is available at most retailers where floor cleaning products are sold and on Amazon. Also available for your other hard surface floors like Stone, Tile, Laminate, Vinyl, and LVT. For cleaning tips and exclusive offers, visit Bona.com slash Bona Clean. The War on Drugs is the excuse our government uses to get away with absolutely insane stuff. Stuff that'll piss you off. The cops, are they just like looting? Are they just like pillaging? They just have way better names for what they call,

like what we would call a jack move or being robbed. They call civil acid work. Be sure to listen to the War on Drugs on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Brought to you by the reinvented 2012 Camry. It's ready, are you? Welcome to Stuff You Should Know from HowStuffWorks.com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles W. Chuck Bryant. Me. Yeah, that's right. That's me. Now fall over. But yes, not yet, Chuck. We're getting there. Okay. Okay. Um, how are you doing? You feeling a little sick after Los Angeles?

Yes, Josh. Heavy workload and stress usually means Chuck crashes and gets sick afterward. Yeah, I came very close. That's what happened. As I was telling you, I'm a walking ad for emergency. I know. It works really well. It's good stuff. Um, Chuck, I hope you feel better soon. Thank you. Um, in the meantime, let's talk about the satanic symbol that is the goat. Yeah, the inverted star is supposed to be a goat head. Is that right? Yes. That is actually the baphomet. The baphomet. The baphomet. It's, I think, a 17th century French illustration. No, 19th century French magician, Elias Levi, drew the baphomet of Mindy's, right? Okay. And Mindy's is like the key term here. This is where the idea that the goat was satanic came from.

Okay. So back in the day, back when the Greeks were running around Egypt, let's say the fourth century BC, one of them, Herodotus, wrote of the Mindy's people who lived along the Nile and venerated and essentially worshiped goats, specifically male goats, as symbols of fertility. And the Greeks, doing what they did, eventually ripped this idea off and labeled their god Pan, the king of the satyrs, the half god, half man god. That's right. Who liked to woo the ladies and basically press his male goat sexuality onto them. Right? Okay. So we have the idea that a male goat, aka a ram, in a lot of cases, I'm pretty sure, became the symbol for powerful male sexuality, right? Sure. Why not? As the Christian church came about and sexuality kind of diverged from

reality, that concept became more and more taboo, increasingly taboo, until finally you get to the point where we arrive at the Knights Templar who supposedly venerated a baphomet. Those guys pop up a lot with us. They do. That image of baphomet, not the 19th century one, but the image of a goat head, which they supposedly idolized, was used against them to persecute them as Satanists and kill them. And from that point forward, the goat went from pagan god of male fertility or sexuality to satanic from that moment on, to the point now where you can look at a goat and you get a touch of evil from it, don't you? No. I was just about to counter and say that's funny because goats are the sweetest, most adorable little creatures on

the planet. It depends. First of all, it depends on their age. It depends on their size. It depends on how readily you can see those satanic eyes of theirs. I disagree. It's Satan walking the earth, Chuck. Let's just come out and say it, okay? Well, everyone knows I had pet goats, so you're not going to get me to say anything like that. Plus, if you're anything, you're a lackey for the goat lobby. I am. Yeah. What about fainting goats, though? I have to agree. These are not satanic. They fall into the cute camp, right? Yeah. It's pretty cute and sad and funny. It's all wrapped up into one. In fact, I have never experienced such a range of emotions as when I watched fainting goats and fainting kittens. Yeah. Fainting kittens in particular got my goat.

I just showed Lizzie. It's awesome. She laughed harder than I thought she would. Because it's hilarious, Chuck. It's so sad looking, though. I know, but then they kind of look around and look like a stupid kitten and look a few times and they're fine. I urge anyone who hasn't seen, first of all, fainting goats to go onto youtube.com. That's Y-O-U-T-U-B-E.com. It's kind of like a video repository of sorts. You can share videos. Yeah. It's amazing. You type in fainting goats and then watch the one with the greatest number of hits. You will see what we're talking about. I think it's 10,800,000 hits right now. Yeah. Watch that one. You'll see what we're talking about the rest of the time. You can also, if you want to treat yourself, type in fainting goat kittens hyphen

original video. Yeah. You'll see what makes me laugh and makes Chuck cry. If you want to really treat yourself, type in, where's B? Oh, that one's adorable. The little lamb. Yeah. Is that a lamb or a goat? It's a lamb. But a lamb is a female goat, right? Or it's a baby goat? Isn't a goat a male lamb? A baby goat is a kid. A lamb is a lamb. Huh. Oh yeah. A lamb is a baby sheep. Yeah. Okay. We're all set. No need for emails, everybody. Myotonic goats. Okay. So yeah, there's other names for these things. Now that hopefully you've gone and watched this, you're up to speed and you know, we're about to be talking about because we are going to explain this weird phenomenon that is fainting goats, AKA, as you just said, myotonic goats. What else? Chuck, where are some

other awesome names for these things? The Tennessee Stiff Legs, which is a good name for a band, as is myotonic goats. Tennessee Wooden Legs, Nervous Goats, and Fall Down Goats. I imagine Fall Down Goats was pretty early in the game. Yeah. That's what BamBam from Flintstone called them. Exactly. They go by several different names, Josh, but they are not fainting at all, actually. Okay. No. We should say if you are too lazy to go look up this YouTube video and you don't know what we're talking about, basically these goats, the videos of goats who are being chased by like a farmer or something with an umbrella, and all of a sudden they'll just stiffen up and fall over and it looks like they fainted dead away or possibly died and instantly gone into rigor mortis.

It looks like they've been shot and killed by a sniper. Exactly. And then after a second, they just kind of get up and run away some more. And yeah, they're called fainting goats, but it's not at all what's going on. Instead, Chuck, it's like an altered startle response, right? Yeah. It's a congenital condition. It means they get it since their little baby kid goats, they were born with it. It's called myotonia congenita. And there's another couple of names, the Becker type disease or Thompson's disease. And you know, basically we'll get into the specifics, but what happens is they tense up like the fight or flight, like if an explosion went off right behind you right now, you tense up and then go whew. Maybe. What happens here is they tense up

and they don't untense. They stay stiff long enough to fall over on their side as if they were dead. Yes, appropriately. Robert Lamb who wrote this article points out, it's like that, you know, when you tense up from a from a fright or a startle or danger, flight or fight, fight, fight or flight. It's been a while clearly. That tension that's relieved almost immediately, that basically your brain like getting your body like zapped into preparedness. Like get ready to run. Right. Go to stop thinking about tissue roll pops, jerk. It's time for you to kick some bottom. Yeah. Or in the goats case, quit thinking about that big patch of grass. Right. There's a wolf behind you. Right. Running it out of here. Exactly. But instead of running, they tense up,

they fall over because their muscles take about 10 or 20 seconds to relax. Right. Yes. The war on drugs impacts everyone, whether or not you take drugs. America's public enemy number one is drug abuse. This podcast is going to show you the truth behind the war on drugs. They told me that I would be charged for conspiracy to distribute a 2,200 pounds of marijuana. Yeah. And they can do that without any drugs on the table. Without any drugs. Of course, yes, they can do that. And I'm the prime example of that. The war on drugs is the excuse our government uses to get away with absolutely insane stuff. Stuff that'll piss you off. The property is guilty. Exactly. And it starts as guilty. It starts as guilty. The cops,

are they just like looting? Are they just like pillaging? They just have way better names for what they call, like what we would call a jack move or being robbed. They call civil acid. Be sure to listen to the war on drugs on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcast. Standing at eight feet, two inches tall, Charles Byrne was the tallest man in the world. In fact, it earned him the nickname the Irish Giant. And when Charles arrived in London in 1782, he caused quite a stir. But by May the following year, death came calling for Charles in the form of tuberculosis. And while most people were ready to mourn his passing, one man was plotting with gleeful excitement for a chance to dissect the Irish Giants remains. This January, Grim and Mild

Presents will shift focus from the great wide world around us to the universe inside us all, in a journey that will span thousands of years and countless borders, we plan to unpack the dark and twisted history of healing medicine. So wash your hands, set out your tools and prep for surgery. Grim and Mild Presents Bedside Manners is available now. Find Grim and Mild Presents wherever you listen to podcasts. Learn more at grimandmild.com. So you talked about myotonic, they're myotonic goats. Myotonia exists in more than just goats. It exists in humans as well. Kittens, we said. Yeah, um, saddest video ever. Awesome. And myotonia is basically this. It's a nervous disorder of the central nervous system, a congenital one, like you said, Chuck, that's

characterized by stiff muscles that they're rigid and they take time to relax, right? Yeah, I think the involuntary or voluntary muscles, we should say, not like your cardiac muscle or your involuntary muscle. Sure. The stat I found was that it affects about one in 100,000 people and in northern Scandinavia, one in 10,000. Huh, who knew? Well, I guess they have a bottleneck up there, so I don't know because not that many people want to move up to Scandinavia. I didn't see any kind of explanation for why there would be more abundant there, but that's how many it affects in people. If it's, uh, if you have it, there's some medication. It's not that big of a deal. Stay exercise, stay loose. Right. Don't walk around big piles of glass, I would say, or beds of nails.

You don't want to fall on anything like that. Maybe you shouldn't be driving a car. But I don't think humans actually stiffen and fall over like the goats. I think it's more of a, you know, temporary stiffening. Or again, as Robert Lane put it, a full-body Charlie horse, but without the pain. Yeah. Yeah, they say they don't feel pain. I don't know about that. Yeah, we'll get into that in a second. All right. But there's a similar condition, too, called myoclonus. And it's actually the basis of my favorite, probably my favorite physiological trait of humans. What's that? The myoclonic jerk. You know, when you're falling asleep and then all of a sudden you go, and you wake. Is that what that's called? Yeah, yeah, that happens to me. And if you'll notice,

most of the time, you're dozing and you're dreaming of maybe falling down a stair or something like that. So apparently your brain is either confused that you are in fact falling or that it doesn't understand why your muscles are relaxing in some weird way. Right. And it's jolting you awake. Okay. Or it thinks you are dying and it's railing against dying, trying to get your heart going again. Either way, thank you, body, yes, and mind. But another name for it is the hypnic jerk. The hypnic jerk. It's just great. Do you like it when it happens to you or is it just neat? It's just funny. Yeah. Yeah, it's a weird feeling. It's sort of like when you almost fall back in a chair and you catch yourself, there's nothing more like, you know, thrilling to the body

than that, that, oh my gosh, I'm going to die here in one second. Exactly. So you're, you're, it's thrilling because your muscles tense up. You have to wonder if you're just sitting there for 10 or 20 seconds. Does your brain, your brain apparently would know that there's no longer any danger, but you can't move. Right. Which I imagine would kind of be kind of stressful. We know that the brain knows that there's no longer any danger because the actual disorder is on the cellular level in the muscles, right? Yeah. There's a gene, Josh, called the CLCN1, the chloride channel 1 gene. Of course. And it's involved in the production of proteins, which are, you know, proteins are good for muscle relaxing and contracting and

stuff like that. Well, yeah. And chloride ions specifically, right? Yeah. What's the deal? Too much chloride? Yeah. You, well, you want, remember, check the point of being alive as a functioning body is homeostasis, right? Right. So you want an equal amount or a relatively comparable amount of positively charged sodium ions, which tell your muscles to contract. Right. And negatively charged chloride ions, which say, go ahead and relax muscles, right? Oh, there's not enough chloride in this case. Yes. So there's an abundance of sodium and not enough chloride, which means that when you, when the cells are innervated, the muscle cells are innervated with an electrical impulse from the brain, right? Tents up. It takes them longer to relax because

they're out of whack because this gene is not expressing those chloride ions like it should be. But so it's not the brain any longer thinking that we're afraid or that there's a danger. It's the muscles. It's all in the muscles. That's right. And it is hereditary. It can be dominant or excessive, meaning either one of your parents can have the gene or both. Not too picky there. And the difference is with the goats is they're actually bred to encourage this. Right. And here you mentioned something a second ago that kind of smacked of the ethics of it, right? I don't remember what it was. Maybe I did. You're kind of like, but let's go. Well, just people laughing. Every time I see those videos, I think the goats, you know, they're all

there. They're roaming around their pen and then I get the feeling they see people coming. They're like, oh, God. Here we go again. Some jerk is going to shoot a gun in the air or something. We're all going to fall over and they're going to laugh at us. Very funny. Ha ha. Right. Exactly. So here we go again. And every time they see a human without fail, I'm sure a human does that to them. And the humans laugh and think it's the funniest thing they've ever seen. The goats are just like, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. And actually there's two reasons that fainting goats are bred these days. One is for novelty because they do that. And another is for meat, basically. Yeah, that made me sad. I thought it would just be strictly novelty and having them as a pet.

No. And initially, I mean, that's what most livestock goats are used for is meat. And frankly, they're delicious. But I wouldn't know. They're so delicious. But if you think of them as satanic, you can eat them all day long. It's like you're eradicating evil by eating the goat. You know what I'm saying? Sure. Give me one of those evil satanic goat tacos. I want to do my part. Can I give you like a tad of history? Yeah. Do you want to talk about the history of it? Sure. Okay. I know we're hopping around here. That's right. Go on fire. Like B. But the reason that Tennessee stiff legs or fall down goats, as some people call them, are called Tennessee stiff legs or Tennessee wooden legs is because they were brought down from Nova

Scotia allegedly by a farmhand named John Tinsley. Yeah, that's what they think. Yeah. From what I saw, that was the likeliest explanation. Yeah. To Marshall County, Tennessee in the late 1800s, 1880s. Yep. And he started breeding them, which is called unnatural selection. We'll get to that in a second. Yeah. But the goats were originally not bred for novelty, right? It took 100 years for them to really start to be bred for novelty. They were bred because, Chuck, as you pointed out, their muscles don't atrophy. Right. They do the opposite, right? Well, yeah. I mean, if you think there's muscle waste going on, think again, because it actually makes the animal much leaner for slaughter. Right. It's hard for me to even say that. Right. So because of all the tensing

and un-tensing that they do more than the average animal, they're kind of bulk. They're ripped. Yeah, they're buff. Right. So they have a loaf. They're lean meat, but there's a lot of meat to muscle as well. So they're prized for their meat. And apparently their propensity toward myotonism, phytonia, tensing up, fainting, prevents them from climbing fences, which is a big problem when you're keeping goats as livestock. They like to just hop right over a fence to erect for them. Mine didn't. No. My goats loved being pet goats. I'm sure. Were they house goats? Well, no. We had a big pin, and they were actually in there with the dogs. We had two dogs and two goats. And they were, I mean, the goats, I think, took their cues from the dogs because they were very,

very playful. And I used to play games with my goat, Nester, all the time. Whatever happened. Nester, well, Billy died, which is very sad. That's a good name. And then, of course, and then Nester, we eventually were like, you know what? We need to move Nester out to a farm. So we, this lady took him. And Nester rode the back of the truck with me with his head on my lap the whole way. And what did the lady do to Nester? Do you think I think she kept Nester as a goat? And that's the story I'm sticking to. Nester was a pet until he died of old age. That's a beautiful story, Chuck. Okay, so good. So your goats fared very well. I'm glad to hear that. I remember the goats at my birthday party. One of them was a house goat, remember? Oh, yeah. House goat.

So there was an actual reason that feigning goats were bred initially. And it wasn't for kicks. The Tennessee farmers of the 1880s actually were a little more soulful than the ones today. Yeah. And it wasn't funny back then. Nothing was funny. I'm sure somebody, right? Yeah, exactly. Don't laugh at that. I can't say it. I just had like 80 great jokes ran through my hand. So are you talking about the protection of the herd? Not yet. Oh, okay. So the goats become an established breed of their own by the 1950s. Right. And about that time they started to leave Tennessee, I think for Texas was the next place that they really spread out. But it wasn't until the 1980s that the goats were really diverged into two, not necessarily two different breeds,

because they haven't separated yet. But there's one line that's generally bred for meat, right? Like the original version. Gotcha. The other line is bred as a novelty. Okay. And they tend to be smaller and just faint like that. Cuter. Yes. Faint longer. Yeah. Because if you just kind of leave it alone, the Myotonia is worse as a younger, worse early in life. Yeah, they get kind of used to it. Sometimes more they adapt to it. They're not as scared later in life. So yeah, younger goat is more prone to fall over. Exactly. So but I think if you compare an adult fainting goat bread in that line to be a novelty to a goat that was bred for its meat of the same age, the novelty goat's going to probably fall over at the drop of a hat. Because farmer thinks

that's funny. Well, the other reason that Robert says they can't find much evidence of this anymore, but I guess back in the day, they would, and this sort of makes sense, they would add some of these fainting goats to their herd of regular goats in case there were predators around, a pack of wolves come up, scares the little pebbly doo-doo out of these goats, and then the stiff goats fall over and get eaten while the other ones take off and run. So it essentially, it's almost like they're not bait, but you know, a much easier kill, keep the wolves occupied so the rest of them can escape. You know what they are? What? A sacrificial lamb. Yeah, you're right. That's exactly what they are. But there's no evidence that that's really

the reason that they're breeding them now. No, and there's apparently not much evidence that, or how much that was used. I think it could have just been a good idea, right? Yeah. So Chuck, the idea of, like make no mistake, myotonia is a deficiency. It's a disorder. Sure. It's not a desirable trait. So the idea of taking, because it's an undesirable trait, under natural selection, it shouldn't exist, right? Right. Because if you take a fainting goat, out in nature, like you said, along with a herd of sheep or other goats or whatever, no, they'll be the first to eat, and then they won't have a chance to reproduce eventually, and that trait will die out. But them being bred for that, for an undesirable trait,

and then protected by humans, whether by a fence or, you know, like a hillbilly with a shotgun or whatever, that's called unnatural selection, right? Yeah. Nothing natural about it. No. Or artificial selections, another way to put it. Yeah. And anytime something like that happens, there's going to be some people probably at an organization called PETA that might stand up and say, I don't know if this is such a cool thing for humans to do. And PETA, as expected, isn't the biggest fan of raising fainting goats. Humane society isn't so worried about it. They say there's a lot more breeding issues in the world that we should be more concerned about, and neither one of them have an official stance. But no, the woman from PETA that Robert interviewed in this article

sounded like she hadn't heard of fainting goats until he called her. Oh, really? Yeah. That's the impression I got. Oh, yeah. The quote is a little vague, isn't it? Yeah. Yeah. She just like, the standard PETA quote, just plug in the animal. But who knows? There is no official stance, though. So maybe Robert alerted her to this whole phenomenon. Yeah, but they have an official stance now, and it stopped breeding fainting goats. It's a little late for that, though. It's recognized and prized as a separate American breed of goat. There's about 3,000 to 5,000 of them running around and then falling over. Right. And they don't look like they're going anywhere. The livestock conservancy, I think, is what it's called. Suggest that this breed of goat be

very much protected and taken care of and conserved is, I guess, the best word to use. The war on drugs impacts everyone, whether or not you take drugs. America's public enemy, number one, is drug abuse. This podcast is going to show you the truth behind the war on drugs. They told me that I would be charged for conspiracy to distribute 2200 pounds of marijuana. Yeah, and they can do that without any drugs on the table. Without any drugs, of course, yes, they can do that, and I'm the prime example of that. The war on drugs is the excuse our government uses to get away with absolutely insane stuff. Stuff that'll piss you off. The property is guilty, exactly. And it starts as guilty. It starts as guilty.

Cops, are they just, like, looting? Are they just, like, pillaging? They just have way better names for what they call, like, what we would call a jack move or being robbed. They call civil asset for it. Be sure to listen to the war on drugs on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Standing at eight feet two inches tall, Charles Byrne was the tallest man in the world. In fact, it earned him the nickname the Irish Giant. And when Charles arrived in London in 1782, he caused quite a stir. But by May the following year, death came calling for Charles in the form of tuberculosis. And while most people were ready to mourn his passing, one man was plotting with gleeful excitement for a chance

to dissect the Irish Giant's remains. This January, Grim and Mild Presents will shift focus from the great wide world around us to the universe inside us all in a journey that will span thousands of years and countless borders we plan to unpack the dark and twisted history of healing medicine. So wash your hands, set out your tools, and prep for surgery. Grim and Mild Presents Bedside Manners is available now. Find Grim and Mild Presents wherever you listen to podcasts. Learn more at GrimandMild.com slash presents. Did I tell you about Emily and the little baby goat at the winery? No. At the winery in Athens? No, we went to right before this LA trip. You know, we went to Santa Barbara, one country.

And we went in this one winery. And as we were going in, there was a guy with a dog outside. And, you know, of course, we attacked this dog and were petting it. He said, yeah, they wouldn't let it in because they got a goat, a baby goat in there. So Emily hears this, of course, and it's just like, in this inside is saying, where's the goat? Where's the goat? This lady has a, probably about a six week old kid in her arms wrapped in a blanket that's has some sort of physical ailment, not feigning goat syndrome. It was part human? Part human. It had human hands. No, but she had this little baby kid and, you know, Emily goes over and starts drooling. And the lady says, do you want to hold it? And in less than a second,

the goat swap had been made. And, you know, for the next 20 minutes, this goat is literally like nuzzling Emily in the neck. And I took about 20 pictures of the range of emotions on Emily's face. Yeah. Was there any crying at all? There wasn't crying. It was just, it was a type of ecstasy that you rarely see in an adult human female. That is very cool. Yeah. Very cute. You're like, long story short, we own that goat now. Yes. Yeah. No, not true. My aunt used to have a pygmy goat in California along the Russian River. Did they not get big, I guess? No. I would say a pygmy feigning goat would be about the cutest combination. Yeah. Especially one that like asked to shine your shoes with like big girl eyes or something. Those kittens, oh man. I can't watch that. Yeah.

It looks, it just doesn't look right. It's awesome, I think. Because they don't look like they're hurt. They don't look injured. They just look surprised every time and then fine. Well, kittens look surprised with everything. They just, they have that constant look of surprise. Yeah. Anything else? No, we've touched on the satanic nature of goats, meat goats, fainting goats, fainting kittens, unnatural selection, Tennessee, Texas, the 19th century. And that's about it, right? Emily's unnatural love of animals. Yeah. Myoclonic jerks. Yeah. Everything's right on. And now, you know, when you see these videos and you show your buddies, you can now tell people something. This is exactly what's going on. They're not fainting

at all, actually. Yeah. Stupid. So, if you want to learn more about fainting goats, remember, go to YouTube, y-o-u-t-u-b-e dot com and type in fainting goats and then fainting goat kittens. This doesn't really make sense. It could just be fainting kittens, but still. Yeah. And you'll see some hilarity. You can also learn more about fainting goats in a very well written and well researched article by Robert Lamb of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, How Fainting Goats Work. Type that into the handy search bar and howstuffworks.com and that will bring that up. And that means I just brought up Listener Man. That's right, Josh. I'm going to call this a real CSI, dude. This is from Ed in Chico, California. Hey, Josh and Chuck and Jerry. I'm a crime scene investigator for a municipal

police department in rural Northern California. Being a CSI is just one of my collateral assignments. I'm also an evidence technician and have a couple of other titles depending on who's given me orders that day. Nearly every agency in my area has trained cops or civilians to be a CSI when needed, not as a standalone assignment. So that kind of answers one of the questions we had. Yeah. I showed interest in being a CSI when I started my evidence assignment four years ago and was sent to basic CSI school and later advanced CSI crime scene reconstruction school. He skipped right over intermediate. Yeah, I guess so. And finally, blood spatter analysis. We also do monthly in-house training on topics like photography, trajectories, DNA collection, buried body excavation, etc.

Our CSIs are jacks of all trades since our agencies are too small to be able to afford specialized positions. Your show is very well researched and had all the highlights of blood spatter and forensic photography. And as a sidebar, while we do have two big expensive $2,000 SLR cameras, we really only use them for the most specialized photos like nighttime crime scenes. 99% of the time they use a point and shoot from Walmart. Really? Yeah. I can see that though. I mean like that technology's gotten good enough so that I'm sure. I know, but it would just seem weird if you saw Dexter like walk up a little point and shoot. Yeah. And plus, I think if you were the family of like a murder victim and you saw some guy walk up a point and shoot, you'd be

like, are you even supposed to be here? Yeah. How about a real camera? Yeah. How about a little respect? You mentioned blood voids at a crime scene. We call them blood shadows. Oh, I like that one too. That's pretty cool. Coolish. Enjoy being a CSI, but like Josh said ages ago, television ain't nothing like reality. I can't stand watching those shows and driving crazy with their not based in reality writing. In reality, DNA evidence takes one to two months and latent prints can take four or five months, not four to six minutes. Yeah. And the other thing is, is like everybody is just this jack of all trades. Like, oh, I got these prints off of this scene and I'm going to go analyze them and I'm going to go like shake down the bad guys. Right. You know, it's like spend more money

on an ensemble, will you? Thank you, Ed from Chico. Oh, that was it. Yeah, that was it. Sorry to end your letter with a rant from me, Ed. Thank you very much for your illuminating letter. We appreciate it. We want to hear from you. First of all, you can go check us out on Facebook, facebook.com. You should know. You can follow us on Twitter, syskpodcast, and you can join our QV team, kiva.org, slash team slash stuff. You should know. You can also always email us. And specifically, if you have ever tampered with natural selection through artificial selection, we want to hear about it. Send us an email about this. Right, Chuck? That's right. That's a stuff podcast at howstuffworks.com.

For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howstuffworks.com. Want more How Stuff Works? Check out our blogs on the howstuffworks.com homepage. Brought to you by the reinvented 2012 Camry. It's ready. Are you? The war on drugs is the excuse our government uses to get away with absolutely insane stuff, stuff that'll piss you off the cops. Are they just like looting? Are they just like pillaging? They just have way better names for what they call like what we would call a jack move or being robbed. They call civil acid. Be sure to listen to the war on drugs on the iHeart radio app,

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