Extreme Omni Goat

Need your railroad eaten? He's the goat-to guy.

"I would like to make a robot goat, capable of eating the Internet," he said. "It would probably be called the Intergoat. Intergoat 2.0 would be wireless."

—from an interview with Tom Siddell

The general portrayal in fiction that all goats are creatures that fall under the Extreme Omnivore heading. To the point that if anyone brings a goat into a story, there's a good chance that they'll eat something important that they weren't supposed to. This is normally played for laughs, but can also be used in more dramatic works where the goat's hunger causes serious, long-term problems for the characters.

Tin cans often feature, because there's a myth that goats eat metal cans in real life. It comes from goats that chew on the cans in order to eat the paper and glue of the labels.

Not to be confused with Omniglot.

Examples of Extreme Omni Goat include:

Advertising

McDonald's has an animated ad campaign featuring a goat who keeps eating everything around the farm. His concerned owners start feeding him Happy Meals so he can eat healthier, since they offer choices like apples and milk and whatnot.

Anime and Manga

One Piece: Fleet Admiral Sengoku keeps a pet goat around, which spends its time disposing of his scrap paper.
Nichijou: Sasahara's goat Kojirou takes a bite out of one of Mio's drawings in Episode 16. Big mistake.
Bleach: Nel's Animal Motif is antelope and goat-antelope based. Her release is named after the chamois (a goat-antelope) and her centaur-form is a gemsbok (a true antelope). Her mask also has sheep horns (and sheep are goat-antelopes). In keeping with the fiction about goats (also a type of goat-antelope), she is also the only hollow we've ever seen eat ceros. She does it deliberately because her body is taking in her opponent's attack, mixing it with her own cero power, to regurgitate it back at her enemy as an attack much more powerful than either she or her enemy could perform alone. This also plays on the ruminant behaviour of goat-antelope and antelope digestion systems.

Comic Books

Scrooge McDuck once bought a goat to guard his money bin in the Disney comics. Unfortunately, it both guarded and ate the money so Scrooge sold it back to the previous owner.
Referenced in one Robert Crumb Mr. Natural comic. Crumb is telling a city-dweller about how he needs to go out and actually live life, recommending that he goes out to spend some time at a farm. After being convinced, the city-dweller asks Mr Natural if goats really eat cans—and Mr Natural immediately flies into a rage over the sheer absurdity of the question.
A Les Pretend comic strip in The Beano features this where he pretends to be a policeman and tries making a goat his subordinate. During this they manage to scare a pizza delivery guy and the goat eats the pizza, angering Les because he is eating the "evidence".
Two Archie Comics examples:
- In one, Archie gets a pet goat (just roll with it) and takes it to Mr. Lodge's, where it eats the latter's prize roses. Duh.
- In another, as a way to make money quickly and and without doing any work, Jughead gets his pet goat (again...) to mow lawns. He lets the goat lose and it just starts chewing. Problem is, while it's grazing on grass it also eats Betty's flowers and Archie's recycling cans. Jug just brushes this off, until it decides to snack on his own portable TV set. Goodbye goat.

Film

The trailer for the film Babies end with a goat (implicitly, but not shown) eating a baby's feces.
In the recent New Zealand-made film Boy, the titular character's pet goat eats the money he hid in the old car in his backyard.
Mrs. Doubtfire features an early scene where the main character allows his son to have a wild birthday party, complete with a petting zoo. A goat ends up eating the mother's flowers, much to her chagrin.
A Running Gag in Kung Fu Panda 2 entailed Soothsayer, a goat, taking bites out of Lord Shen's robes whenever she got a chance.
In Percy Jackson and the Olympians: The Lightning Thief, Grover the Satyr casually chews apart an aluminum soda can in one scene.

Jokes

Two goats are feeding in a dumpster when one eats a film roll. "How's that?", the other goat asks. "Not bad", says the first one, "but the book was better".

Literature

Grover of Percy Jackson and The Olympians is actually a satyr, but half-goat surely counts and he certainly eats everything.
- Same for Philocites in Disney's |Hercules, who at one point is seen eating pottery, the Ancient Greece equivalent of the tin can.
An early Thomas the Tank Engine story features The Fat Controller leaning out of a window, causing his hat to blow off his head, where a goat eats it for tea.
In one of the Little Eddie books by Carolyn Haywood, Eddie gets a goat, which his father eventually makes him take to their cousins who live on a ranch in Texas because the goat eats everything.
There's a children's book called Gregory, the Terrible Eater, written by Mitchell Sharmat and illustrated by Jose Aruego and Ariane Dewey. It's about a goat, whose parents are very concerned—he doesn't want to eat normal things like cans and boxes, he wants these bizarre concoctions, like scrambled eggs, and tacos, and peanut butter sandwiches. They eventually start him on a regimen that centers around compromise-they'll let him eat what he wants (ie some peas) if he also eats what they think he should (ie the can); they realize it's worked too well when he starts noshing on Dad's ties and Mom's sewing kit, and have to tell him to scale it back a bit.
The Pet Goat, part of the "Reading Mastery" series for elementary schoolchildren, features an extreme omni goat who accidentally becomes a hero after attacking a car thief. The book gained attention after being read by George W. Bush to an elementary school class in Florida - he was reading the book to the students when he was notified of the September 11 attacks, and infamously decided to stay and finish reading the book.
The Hunger Games makes the point that goats' tendency to convert any old random forage into four quarts of milk a day means that ownership of one "can change a person's life" in areas of food scarcity. Very much Truth in Television.

Live-Action TV

One episode of M*A*S*H involves the entire payroll being eaten by a goat (which had been bought by one of the first soldiers to get paid under the auspice of it being economically sound—he could, after all, get fresh milk from it). This causes numerous problems for the unit, as they must convince superiors that they lost their money because a goat ate it, and one character had taken a loan from another at a ludicrous interest rate on the assumption that he would be able to pay it back pretty much the next day.
The Andy Griffith Show episode "The Loaded Goat" has the title critter endangering the town of Mayberry after consuming a crateful of dynamite sticks.
- Though since dynamite doesn't explode easily, it was doubtful that the town was ever in any danger.
In How I Met Your Mother Ted spends most of an episode trying to keep a goat from eating Robin's towels.
In Mahou Sentai Magiranger, the stomachs of two celestial goats form an inter-dimensional mail delivery system - one is fed with a letter, which the other will cough up no matter where it is.
An old Sesame Street animation features a song about the letter "o" and words containing it. At one point we see a goat "eating a bowl of bones, potatoes, and soap"...followed by the bowl itself.
An episode of Sabrina the Teenage Witch had Sabrina calling in a guy with a bunch of goats to get rid of (read: eat) a bunch of magical poppies.
An episode of That's So Raven has Raven harboring a goat in her house that eats her cellphone (among many other things).

Music

The song Paddy McGinty's Goat, though his preference was largely for clothing, especially the back of people's outfits.

Newspaper Comics

In Footrot Flats, Wal got a goat to eat the grass. It eats everything except the grass, and hates Wal. When it gets angry it usually takes Horse to bring it under control.

Tabletop Games

Fun Magic: The Gathering fact: The Big Eater Atog creature type was based on the extreme omnivore trait of goats. In fact, "Atog" is an anagram for "Goat".
In the Warhammer 40,000 universe, there is a creature in one of the races' army that basically goes around recycling waste material to make more units. It's description basically amounts to "a omnivorous space goat" making this Goats... IN SPACE!

Video Games

In Broken Sword 2 there are several inventory items that serve no purpose other than occasionally eliciting funny responses when you discuss them with other characters. If you try to show your Lucky Piece of Coal to the goat in Quaramonte, it eats it.
Completing a runthrough of Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater having eaten at least one sample of every edible substance earns the player the codename 'Markhor,' which is a type of goat (that the player can encounter, and, yes, eat at one point).

Web Comics

Although Bug doesn't show the goat eating something anything, goats' propensity for eating anything is used in this comic.
In Wizard School Graham's familiar Goatsie is interested in eating everything from sheets to loafers to stripper heels.

Web Original

The Livejournal mascot is Frank the Goat, who is often blamed for "eating" posts and comments.

Western Animation

In Popeye's The Hungry Goat (1943), the eponymous goat seemed to actually prefer metal, cans or otherwise. Of course this caused no end of trouble for our hero, whose Navy ship the goat decided to eat.
- No kidding! The single, rather small goat simply boards the ship and rapidly consumes anything he can get his teeth on, including an enormous length of chain that just vanishes into negative space.
In Steamboat Willie, a goat eats Minnie's ukulele and sheet music. So Mickey uses it as a living phonograph.
The wartime Looney Tunes cartoon "Scrap Happy Daffy" had old-school Daffy trying to build up a scrap heap for the war effort and matching wits with a Nazi goat who tried to eat it all.
In The Hunchback of Notre Dame (the Disney version), Djali the goat eats Quasimodo's figures, which are made out of wood.
As usual, Tex Avery takes this trope and goes to town with it in the MGM cartoon "Billy Boy", about a goat that literally eats a farmer out of house and home. The cartoon ends with Billy being flown to the moon... which he then eats!
And of course, Donald Duck has had one of these as well. I think it ate the rope.
A Justice Friends short has a goat eating Valhallen's guitar.
Averted in The Simpsons. When the family goes to a petting zoo Homer tries to get a goat to eat a tin can and it won't do it.
During the climax of the My Little Pony Friendship Is Magic episode "Putting Your Hoof Down", the goats accompanying Iron Will are shown munching on Pinkie's tail and each others' ties while Iron Will was trying to collect payment from Fluttershy.

Real Life

Truth in Television, within limits. Goats eat roses. To try and stop them somebody bred roses that supposedly tasted so horrible the goats wouldn't eat them. The goats ate them.
- At a petting zoos, where you can feed the animals, they sometimes hand out little dixie cups full of feed. Some goats, when offered, eat the whole thing- cup and all. It is imperative that you keep the feed away from your shoulder-bag. Especially if you have some important documents in them.
- In Real Life, goats are the only animal that can eat poison ivy with no ill effects.
- They'll also eat shoelaces, as petting zoo experience can attest.
- They also might be the only creatures that can keep vicious thorned Himalayan blackberries under control.
- In fact, some goat breeders make a living out of renting their goats to fields experiencing outbreaks of noxious weeds. The goats are the safest and most efficient way to clear the fields, and the goats get fed. Win/win!
Goats aren't the only cloven-hoofed animals that fulfill the Big Eater type. The capital city of Nara prefecture in the Kansai region of Japan have tame deer who live to eat and are not fussy about anything. Anything offered (and not offered) by tourists they eagerly gulp down, including deer biscuits, clothes, and map directions. One unusual case involved a deer gnawing on the iron chains separating the lawns and temple's approach, which it then taught to the other deer https://web.archive.org/web/20130617213924/http://www.houseofjapan.com/local/chain-eating-deer-at-nara