All the most exciting technological innovations start life in the US, don’t they? The space shuttle, the iPhone, the lightbulb. Now, a new invention can be added to this list – an app that enables you to send your friends pictures of goats, purporting to be from the goats themselves, along with faintly disappointing goat puns. It is inexplicably popular with a certain genre of tech blog, and thus it reaches us. This is probably how jazz began.

While you have to live in the US to receive a Goat Attack, you don’t have to live there to send one. Accordingly, I went online and paid $0.79 to bombard my expat friend Jon with goat puns. It felt more gleeful than I had expected. This sense only grew when I learned that Jon, an intrepid journalist who, by and large, does not write about goat-based text apps, had been a little unnerved initially, thinking he was “being targeted by someone I’d pissed off with a story”.

Messages Jon received included “ROW ROW ROW YOUR GOAT BITCHES!”, “LET IT GOAT!” and “GOAT’S CHEEEEESSSSSEE!!”. Each was accompanied by a picture of a goat. How does he feel the app could be improved? By “receiving one good goat pic instead of several OK ones”. Did he think, at any point, that he might be getting messages from a goat? “Yes, I wondered for a few minutes then forgot and stopped wondering.” Jon is apparently uncurious about the mysteries of the universe. Will he be trying it himself? “I would never send people goats.”

This kind of barely submerged antipathy is the risk you take with a Goat Attack, I guess, but it’s worth it for the pleasant spell after sending one where you imagine the bemusement on your target’s face, and at least Jon and I are getting some of our issues out in the open at last. Give it a go, if you can find an American. Ideally, one a bit less frumpy than Jon Who Thinks He’s Too Important for Goat Attacks.