Earlier this week, state officials were bewildered to hear that two goats had gotten themselves stuck on a narrow beam underneath of a highway bridge.

While that may sound like the start of a joke, it actually happened to two intrepid farm animals on the Pennsylvania Turnpike over the Mahoning River.

The son of the goat owner called the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation and said that the two goats had already been stuck on the ledge for 18 hours.

Despite the ledge only being 8 inches wide, the goats had walked almost 200 feet out onto the bridge before they reached an obstacle that blocked their path. The brown goat in the front somehow managed to turn around so that it could head back to safety – but the white goat was too apprehensive to perform the same maneuver.

According to transit officials, there were numerous status updates on the "Goat Watch" extraction. Engineers and bridge workers were called in to help save the goats from their dizzying situation.

The rescuers did not even worry about the cost of the operation. One of the goat heroes told NPR: "We didn't even calculate it. We were just trying to be a good neighbor and get the goats back safely."

Two rescuers climbed into a crane and moved up to the goats' location. One of the men grabbed the white goat as tightly as we could and deposited it safely on top of the bridge. Then, they tapped a section of the concrete with a pole so they could encourage the brown goat to walk back to safety.

"In this day and age, when things can go terribly wrong, it was great to see things go right," the bridge's civil engineer, Steve McCarthy, told NPR. "There was no way I was letting go of that goat."

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