What Does The 'Salt Water Goat Torture' Two-Sentence Horror Story Mean? The Viral Reddit Post Explained

Every once in a while, the two-sentence horror subreddit churns out a story that goes viral across social media, either for being genuinely creepy or uncharacteristically silly.

In the case of a recent post by Redditor u/SeveralCountry2478 about a person who has his legs covered in salt water before being presented to a goat for a strange torture method, the story definitely leans more on the latter half of things.

But what does the story even mean, and is it something that could realistically work? Here's what you need to know.

What Is The 'Salt Water Goat Torture' Two-Sentence Horror Story?

On September 17th, Redditor u/SeveralCountry2478 posted a story to /r/TwoSentenceHorror that would go on to garner over 4,500 upvotes over the next three days. With so much support, the story clearly clicked with a lot of readers.

However, others were confused, resulting in several reposts to subreddits like /r/ExplainTheJoke and /r/PeterExplainsTheJoke, with the latter post gaining over 20,000 upvotes in a day. So, what is the story?

The short horror story reads:

"As they soaked my legs in saltwater I thought ‘this isn’t a very effective way to torture someone…’ Until they brought in the goat."

It's pretty vague and without any context, the story might not make a whole lot of sense. As it turns out, the story seems to be a reference to a popular meme dating back to 2014.

What Does The 'Salt Water Goat Torture' Story Mean?

The "Salt Water Goat Torture" story seemingly refers to the 2014 "I Crave that Mineral" meme. The meme is based on a post made by Tumblr user sixpenceee that year in which an image of a goat licking salt from the side of a mountain is captioned, "They crave that mineral."

This post has resulted in a ton of memes over the years referencing the original and how much goats crave salt, which they need to eat as part of their diet to remain healthy.

With this in mind, the meaning of the horror story is that the torturer is covering the person's legs in salt water, then inviting a goat into the room to get the goat to lick the salt off the person's legs until they're worn down to the bone.

It seems like nothing more than a silly and creative idea at first, but surprisingly, it's based on an actual torture method.

Goat tongues are purportedly rough enough to tear off skin, and in the past, people have been tortured by having their feet covered in salt and licked by goats to expose the bone. Beyond this, the post has inspired a few memes since going up on Reddit.

One prominent example sees LeBron James' face posted as a reply to the story, a play on the term "GOAT," meaning "greatest of all time," which many use to refer to the NBA star.

For the full history of Two-Sentence Horror, be sure to check out Know Your Meme's encyclopedia entry for more information.