Goat Yoga

Did The Goat Eat Your Yoga Mat?

---

Sometimes I come across things at the library that I feel broaden my intellectual horizons. I'm also going to use goat yoga and intellectual in a sentence right now, just cause I can.

So, I was minding my own bookish business, processing magazines for patron checkout when, as I was flipping through Sunset magazine, I spied something that I thought was a bit of a joke:

Goat Yoga?

Yep.

Apparently "Goat Yoga" is a "thing".

According to this article, the whole idea hatched when this gal from Oregon was having a birthday party on her farm. A yoga instructor who was in attendance at said party approached the farm owner about mixing goats and yoga together. A farm held yoga+goat mashup was born! The enterprising and open-minded goat herder-ess had, in January of this year, a waiting list of more than 1200 people that wanted to do goat yoga. All I can keep thinking is "Old MacDonald had a downward dog."

What kind of tweaks my hoof trimmers is that I owned no less than 25 cutesy little goats for the last fifteen years. In fact, it appears that I have been doing goat yoga moves since before they were a "thing."

Many times I would have to do a version of "downward reaching feed barrel" as I would bend myself at a ninety degree angle face first into a fifty gallon drum to reach out the hapless, bawling fur baby goat kid that decided to leap onto the lid and plummet into the barrel's depths. When your derriere is in the air you can guarantee that any other goats in the vicinity are either going to bite it or leap not so gracefully upon the protruding gluteus peaks. If a new mountain surface is presented it must be ascended!

Should have named this doeling BOB, for Bottom of the Barrel...

The only time I have ever been in a prone position in the barn was when I was extracting some animal from a head sticking situation. Goats love to get their heads stuck in things and places. It would make no goat-sense to get one's head stuck at a normal height, baaaadddd idea, instead it must be stuck on the very bottom part of the fence, where your herder must lie down in the muck and mire and extract your bawling hindquarters. There wasn't anything serene about my milk does stomping on my back like salsa dancers while I lay in goat pellet repose on the barn floor.

Of course, I also have attained the cobra pose whilst out with my goats, it was shortly after lying in a reverse corpse pose that I found myself unwillingly positioned into a cobra state as one of my goats grasped a hold of my pony tail and gave a loving upright tug. It was then that I morphed rather quickly into child's pose as my scalp felt severed and it seemed the most natural, soothing response at the time.

That turkey in the background liked to crawl all over a person too, do you think turkey yoga would take off?

Now that I think of it, I suppose that by the time I went through each series of poses with my goat herd, perhaps I was a bit more relaxed. I mean, I did a ton of deep breathing as I was yelling at the caprine heathens to back off, and my back always felt better after a "session" as I couldn't feel it due to all of the hoofprint shaped bruises lining each side of my spine. So, one could say that goat yoga might be useful.

However, I no longer own ANY goats and am not sad about their abscense from my farm. Although I will always love scratching those stinky ruminants behind their ears, enjoy the adoring looks they cast from their horizontal pupil eyes, and miss the random assortment of bouncy, silky soft kids that we had every year, I do not miss the sheer volume of destruction and escapism that the creatures wreaked around my farm!

Guess I will just have to pass on the goat yoga for the time being...

---

Additional Addendum Of Explanatory Necessity: I am in no way mocking the idea of the mixture of goats and yoga. If people like it, and it brings both the people and the goats joy, then I'm down with it. I just lived with the 24/7 reality of goats and their needs and deeds for quite a long time, so my perspective is probably a little bleat, er bleak.

---

And as always, all of the images in this post were taken on the author's ancient digital camera or old, goat spit covered iPhone.

---

Want to read more @Generikat posts?

---

Source