Condensation, Sublimation and Melting: Chemical Properties of Caprine Digestion

With final exams looming in front of them next week, my daughters are again trying to cram a semester's worth of knowledge back into their memories. Algebraic scatter plots, linear equations and slope-intercept form are all jumbled together with Chemistry's periodic table and Planck's constant...Scanning the piles of papers strewn all over the table and grabbing a bottle of ibuprofen for her headache, Emily grimaced.

"What's the use of all this stuff anyway?"she asked. "I'll never need it in real life!"

While I too am more content with a Jane Austin novel than a graphing calculator, I could not let this go. Mathematical skills are crucial for raising goats, I assured her. For example, when each goat consumes one ounce of grain per day, how long will a bag of grain last for a two-goat family, allowing for the fact that goat grain is sold in only 50-pound sacks? (Sounds like a dimensional analysis problem, right?) Or, if each goat "excretion event" produces approximately twenty individual pellets, and goats "excrete" about every half hour, how many total pellets will her mother clean up per day when Emily is "too busy studying for finals" to perform this task?

Chemistry has proven even more practical for us recently. Regular readers may recall that Elliot has needed to wear a T-shirt to protect some sore areas on his chest. However, we quickly noticed a strange side-effect to his new wardrobe - a phenomenom explained only by thermodynamic chemical principles. On days that Ellie wears a shirt, the matter which normally exits his body as a solid (individual formed pellets) instead leaves him as a liquid (you don't want any more description than that!) Confounded (and revolted!) by the indescribable mess this produced, we quickly ruled out illness or dietary changes as the culprit - it had to be the shirt. Could Elliot be so embarrassed by having to wear clothes that he lost control of his bowels? However, the answer was no further than my daughter's Chemistry book. Helping her study, I read of the changing states of matter as ice (the solid) is converted to water (the liquid) when the temperature rises...

That's it! Ellie's T-shirt, though comfy 100% cotton, must raise his body temperature just enough to liquefy his waste...

Ellie was very happy to donate all his new shirts to the local thrift store.