One of the most enigmatic passages in the Word of Targhand is chapter 15 verse 3: "You shall not fuck any of the beasts of the world, except one."  From the very beginnings of Targhandism the identity of the Fuckable Beast was a matter of great vexation to theologians, beginning even during the life of Targhand on account of his refusal to clarify or explain any of his writings.  The explanation proposed by the earliest missionaries, chief among them Ghizni, was that the beast in question was the mule, which, being sterile, would never be able to bring another life into the world (a major sin according to their interpretation of Targhand's teachings).  This explanation satisfied most of the early converts to Targhandism, as it was in keeping with the tenets of the religion as generally interpreted at the time, and made a good deal of theological sense.  It continued to be held to by the Ghizniites and other Early Targhandist sects down to the Reformation, and continued to crop up occasionally in retro-Targhandist sects of later periods.

After the death of Targhand in the year 82 T. (680 U.) and the discovery of Odious Truths, which revealed that Targhand's knowledge of earlier Uzdumalian scholarship was much more intense than had previously been thought, most mainstream theologians decided that the reference to "beasts of the world" in 15:3 really referred to the famous Middle Uzdumalian zoological treatise entitled Beasts of the World, meaning that the Fuckable Beast must be found therein.  This was a problem for the traditional understanding of the verse, however, as Beasts of the World famously omitted the mule owing to its hybrid nature (the very same aspect of the animal, ironically, that had led it to be thought fuckable in the first place).  The true identity of the Fuckable Beast became one of the key questions asked by theologians seeking the original meaning of Targhand's writings during the Reformation, and many animals were proposed, with varying degrees of theological justification and popular acceptance.  Opinions on the issue gradually coalesced into two competing camps, goat and sheep.  The sheep camp was centered in Kreyinte and consisted primarily of scholars who had known Targhand personally and their disciples; their arguments for the fuckability of sheep included their softness and stupidity, which were considered highly attractive qualities in a sexual partner according to the Kreyinten school of thought.  The goat camp was centered in Uzda and consisted mainly of recent converts to Targhandism, some of whom had previously been Ghizniites; their arguments were heavily based on the supposed inherent superiority of goats to all other animals (an idea with a long tradition in Uzdan culture and linked to the popularity of goatherding in the area) and appeals to the supposed preferences of various important figures in the history of Targhandism, including Pernitos and Buan.  It is to these historians and exegetes that we owe the story of Buan's father being a goatherd and the tradition that the teenaged Buan woke up at dawn every day to fuck his father's goats.  The Kreyintens countered this story with the tradition (probably slightly better-founded but still untrue) that far from being a mere goatherd, Buan's father was a priest in the temple of Uzda.  This was in keeping with the Kreyinten tendency to downplay the Uzdan contribution to the spread of Targhandism, which included defaming the character of the important Uzdan hero Buan by associating him with the hated old religion.

As time went on, the Goat-Sheep controversy became one of the major issues leading to the permanent separation of Eastern and Western Targhandism after the final defeat of Ghizniism.  The great seminaries in Uzda and Kreyinte became the leading centers of thought for the two denominations, and several genres of written work developed focusing on the controversy as a means of either glorifying one's own sect or denigrating the competing one.  The students at the seminaries were often assigned to write erotic poems about whichever animal was purported to be the Fuckable Beast, the best of which were read at assemblies of the whole school for the edification of the other students, and established scholars often wrote polemical pieces mocking the idea that the beast accepted by the competing denomination could possibly be fuckable.  Uzdan scholars decried the dumb passivity of the sheep and the creepiness of the idea that this was a desirable quality, while Kreyintens mocked the awkward angularity of the goat and wondered how uncomfortable it would be to fuck one.  These were mainly written in the spirit of good-natured ribbing, but political realities often gave them a dark undercurrent, especially during times of war.

Despite all this talk of bestiality in the seminaries, there is very little evidence for anyone from either camp actually putting these ideas into practice.  For these students and scholars this was a purely abstract, theological debate, totally divorced from carnal reality (which in the seminaries mainly meant sodomy and lots of it).  There is a humorous but almost certainly untrue story told about the famous theologian Xornis, who switched from Western to Eastern Targhandism in 301 T., that he was so enthralled by a poem written by a student at the Seminary of Uzda (where he was teaching) that he wandered out into the hills and, happening on a stray nanny goat, decided to see if the experience was as good as the poem suggested.  It turned out to be so unpleasant that he immediately decided that a sheep couldn't possibly be worse, so he immediately renounced his faith, resigned his position, and moved to Kreyinte, where he was very careful not to test out the Kreyinten position for fear that it would be just as bad and he would be left with no other religion to turn to.

See also:

Beasts of the World

Odious Truths

Xornis