Goat Tower

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About

The Goat Tower is a famous landmark located in Paarl, South Africa on the Fairview Wine and Cheese Farm.^[6]While there are four other similar towers in the world^[14], the Fairview tower is the most well-known. On 4chan and elsewhere, it is highly regarded as a sign of utopia due to the rarity of the towers and the imagined secrets held within.

Origin

The Fairview Goat Tower was built in 1981 by the winery’s owner Charles Back^[7], a year after Fairview founded their Cheesery. Since goats are known for their curious nature^[9], many breeds are known for their tree climbing^[8] agility. The towers were built with spiraled staircases since goats can climb more efficiently when the object is on an angle.^[10] The Goat Tower first received major online attention in May 2009, when Illinois farmer David Johnson built a 31-ft. tall replica of the one in South Africa. The story was first reported in a BoingBoing article titled "Goats enjoy living in their own tower"^[16] on July 12th, 2009 and it was reblogged by others including Instructables^[17] and animal blog Goat Berries.^[18]

On 4chan, the first Goat Tower thread was posted to /fit/ (Health and Fitness) on August 23rd, 2011.^[1] The thread posed the question "would you rather get a blowjob from the girl of your dreams, or turn into a goat for a day so you could access the goat tower?" Most users picked the tower, with some anons harassing those who would choose otherwise.

Spread

In the following months, images of the tower appeared on other 4chan boards including /v/^[11] (video games), /r9k/^[12] (ROBOT9000), and /b/^[13] (random), often conditioned with special rules for events like "Dubs get you in; Trips and you can live there; Quads make you king."

Five days after the first /fit/ thread, a photo of the Goat Tower was posted to Reddit^[5] where it received 1234 upvotes and 456 points overall. In September 2011, a second “would you rather” thread featuring a goat tower was posted on the BodyBuilding^[15] forums. On December 6th, 2011, the first goat tower image macro was posted to FunnyJunk.^[3] A month later^[2], a screenshot of the original /fit/ thread was posted to the site as well. The Goat Tower also has a presence on Tumblr.^[4]