Good thing he doesn't raise flying pigs, or we would have swine flu blood all over Asia.
The Goat-Killing Wind Farm Mystery
"I'd bet two goats that this turns out not to be turbine noise."
Me too
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By Martin - Posted on 21 May 2009, 18:22 (GMT)
[bpsdb] I haven't picked on the BBC for a while, but today their department of "and finally..." stories came up with this little gem: "Wind farm 'kills Taiwanese goats'." Now, I've not no axe to grind regarding wind farms, but the story is more tenuous than a fart in a hurricane, and smells about as bad.
The story comes from a small island near Taiwan, on which the imaginatively-named Taiwanese power company TaiPower (who curiously fail to mention collateral goat damage on their website) decided to plant a number of fancy new wind turbines. At the time the eight turbines were installed, nearby farmer Kuo Jing-shan claims to have had 700 goats. Four years later, his herd had been reduced to just 250, as one-by-one they died. The farmer told a local BBC reporter:
"The goats looked skinny and they weren't eating. One night I went out to the farmhouse and the goats were all standing up; they weren't sleeping.
"I didn't know why. If I had known, I would've done something to stop the dying."
Now, I've got no reason to assume that Kuo Jing-shan is telling fibs, although it's worth noting that if his claim is accepted he does stand to gain rather a lot of compensation. Let's leave that aside for now.
The farmer claims that the noise from the wind turbines deprived the goats of sleep, thus driving them to an early, er, plate. That's not an outrageous hypothesis, and spokesman Lu Ming-tseng for the Ministry of Agriculture - who have not yet completed their own inquiry to determine cause of death - said that is was at least plausible:
"Abnormal noises could affect the normal growth and feeding intake of animals and cause them to suffer sleep deprivation."
But the BBC have rather over-egged this statements as far as I can tell. Lu Ming-tseng's quote above is the only quote from any MoA representative to appear in the article, and yet the BBC confidently assert that:
"The Ministry of Agriculture says it suspects that noise may have caused the goats' demise through lack of sleep."
This certainly isn't supported by the quotes in the piece, and if an MoA official has suggested this, it would be nice to see the quote.
The other, bigger problem is that wind farms just don't kill livestock. Millions of animals around the world live, eat, sleep, and breed in their shadow without the slightest problem. I've lived near them myself, and had no issue with the noise. Anecdotally, in Wales you could regularly see Goats and sheep happily grazing underneath them, enjoying the shade they provide. In my experience it's reasonable to assume that to a goat, a wind turbine is like a slightly boring tree.
As far as I can make out, there are no reports of livestock anywhere else in the world having problems with noise from wind farms. If I'm wrong on this, feel free to post links in the comments section and I'll happily eat my words. If I'm right though, it suggests one of two things: the wind farm isn't the problem, or if it is it's due to some freak occurance.
Another thing that bugs me is the time line. If the turbine noise caused that much stress to the flock, you'd expect the deaths to be reasonable clustered, with the bulk of the herd dying around a certain period. In this case though, death apparently trickled on for four years. It doesn't really seem to fit with the idea of a constant external agent.
Hopefully, the MoA will release more details in the near future. In the meantime, I'd bet two goats that this turns out not to be turbine noise.
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