Spoilers below.

Lumon might know them as “Mammalians Nurturable,” but you know them as the Severance goats. The infamous little farm animals made their first (brief) appearance in the Apple TV sci-fi hit’s first season, during which Mark S. (Adam Scott) and Helly R. (Britt Lower) stumble upon a Lumon employee feeding the creatures in a tiny, unobtrusive white room. When Mark and Helly attempt to make contact, the man shoos them away, insisting that “You can’t take them yet! They’re not ready! It isn’t time!” Mark and Helly indeed return to their desks in the Macrodata Refinement (MDR) department, but neither they nor Severance fans forgot about the goats.

Season 2, episode 3, “Who Is Alive?” finally re-centers the babies, this time revealing an entire department devoted to animal care: Mammalians Nurturable, led by a goatherd named Lorne (Gwendolyn Christie). Lorne and her fellow MN members are immediately distrusting of Mark and Helly; their culture is much more similar to that of an insulated farm community than a lifeless corporate office. Still, they’re curious about their fellow Lumon employees, and they eventually agree not to disrupt Mark and Helly’s search for Ms. Casey/Gemma (Dichen Lachman), the former Lumon wellness director and Mark’s kidnapped wife.

Although episode 3 expanded our understanding of the goats’ territory within Lumon, revealing a massive indoor pasture where the goats graze freely, it wasn’t until the season 2 finale that we learned these creatures’s actual purpose.

Initially, the foremost fan theory suggested that Lumon trained its MN employees to (unknowingly) raise baby goats as test subjects for Lumon products and experiments. We know from character interactions in the world outside Lumon that Lumon products are practically ubiquitous. In episode 2, Helly’s Outie blames a “non-Lumon medication” for causing adverse effects while she was drinking at a gala. (This isn’t the actual reason for her behavior, as we know, but it seems a message the public is willing to believe.) If Lumon’s medications are truly so common—and supposedly superior—then it stands to reason that the company might take extreme measures to test their power and safety.

And though some of the MN goats might indeed become such test subjects, the Severance season 2 finale reveals that others are raised not as subjects but as sacrifices.

mark s, helly r, and lorne in severance season 2 standing in a room filled with grass and goats
Apple TV+

Images of sheep, rams, and goats appear frequently throughout Severance seasons 1 and 2, including in the season 2 opening credits and in the creepy “waffle party” scene in season 1’s penultimate episode. Such animals also appear in real-life religious imagery and ancient stories, so it shouldn’t surprise us that Lumon—in an attempt to establish itself as a spiritual institution, not merely a business—would make similar use of the mammals.

We first learn the nature of the company’s bloody endeavor when Lorne re-appears in the season 2 finale, carting along a baby goat named Emile. “Mammalians Nurturable brings an offering,” she tells Mr. Drummond (Ólafur Darri Ólafsson) when she arrives at the sacrifice room, situated across from the Exports Hall that leads to the Testing Floor.

“This beast will be entombed with a cherished woman, whose spirit it must guide to Kier’s door,” Drummond tells Lorne. (The “cherished woman” in question here is, of course, Gemma.) “We commit this animal to Kier, in his eternal war against pain.”

Dressed in all-black mourning regalia and ceremonial jewelry, Lorne’s expression betrays her dismay, and she asks Mr. Drummond, “How many more must I give?”

To which he replies, “As many as the Founder calls.”

It’s important to remember here that, as a member of Mammalians Nurturable, Lorne’s entire life—at least, the life of her Innie—revolves around raising these goats. It must be horrifying to spend so many hours caring for them, only to kill them for an unclear purpose on behalf of a company with unclear aims. As her exchange with Drummond implies, she’s had to do this many, many times.

What the exchange also implies? That Lumon’s many sacrifices include humans, too—and that Gemma wouldn’t be the first. If the goats’s true purpose in Severance is to serve as spirit guides to deceased human souls, whom they “guide to Kier’s door,” it stands to reason that with dead goats comes dead humans. If Lorne has been forced to sacrifice many of her goats, then has Lumon killed an equivalent number of humans? Was Gemma intended to be one of many? And if that theory stands, then how many deaths is Lumon ultimately responsible for?

After season 2, we finally understand how the goats are used within Lumon’s walls. But what they signify about Lumon’s wider web of crimes...it’s looking more and more terrifying by the minute.

This story will be updated.