Two Hearts Bleat as One

I love animals. I kiss dogs on the face, I refuse to step on insects unless they’re really asking for it, and on my last birthday I spent $150 to feed a red panda grapes with a pair of tongs. I have a number of favorite animals, in categories as specific as “best medium-sized mammal,” “coolest fossil,” “most interesting venom,” and so forth. Fictional human deaths seldom touch me, but I was once so traumatized by a dog’s movie death that I threw the DVD away and told Netflix it got lost in the mail.

The few exceptions to my animal love are obvious ones: fireants, scorpions, and goats. Goats are the duds of the animal world, the factory irregular of mammals. They are nasty, brutish, and short, they smell bad, and they have weird eyes. If a princess kissed a goat and it became a person, it would stop returning her texts after two weeks and try to sell her a used car when she broke up with him. Goats will steal change out of your sofa cushions.

And yet … Goats begin their lives as baby goats, which are completely different animals. Ten pounds of fuzzy goodwill precariously balanced on dainty hooves, a baby goat is the laughter of an angel, the sweetest flower of spring, the warm embrace of a grandmother. They are treasures beyond price, all the more loveable because in a few short months, they will go through Goat Puberty and become goats and start selling used antifreeze to tourists as hand grenades.

I learned about these distinct stages in the life cycle of goats at—where else?—Goat Yoga. The idea of performing yoga with goats originated a few years ago in New Hampshire, among people who owned therapy goats (like the therapy dogs who sometimes visit hospital patients) that had become acclimated to human presence. Eminently Instagrammable, Goat Yoga became something of a fad among people who like stretching in the presence of animals (a larger demographic than you might think), and came to New Orleans last year. NOLA Tribe Yoga sold out a series of Goat Yoga sessions last year and has brought the series back this spring.

Their logic is simple, NOLA Tribe Yoga co-founder Baye Tilson explained. Baby animals are one of the undisputed rulers of social media, and providing people a chance to take pictures of themselves with baby goats is a marketing technique as effective as it is cute. Neither she nor business partner McKensie Kirchner were goat people before, but, as Tilson explained, three goats in her lap, “I may be becoming a crazy goat lady.”

The goats live at Paradigm Gardens, a community garden in Central City that provides vegetables to New Orleans restaurants, including Uptown favorite Coquette, and hosts events. There’s a substantial lawn, but it quickly filled with excited Goat Yogis at the session I attended. After a short orientation, we began a yoga class, with the promise that the goats would emerge shortly. It had been a while, and my joints protested at this disruption of what they apparently had taken to be an early retirement, but I enjoyed going through stretches and poses and getting my blood moving in the beautiful outdoor space. I got distracted watching Goat Antics, as did everyone else, but that was all part of the experience.

As we folded and twisted, the goats ambled among us, reacting to being petted and cuddled with varying degrees of patience, and the employees of the farm followed them in their wanderings to make sure they were not becoming too stressed. (The lady in front of me snatched up a gray baby goat as it walked toward me or, more accurately, the pile of goat feed on the front of my yoga mat, but it bleated in her face with such goatish indignation that the Goat Handlers spirited it away.) Yogis with particularly strong planks were treated to having a little goat placed on their backs for a minute; this did not seem to particularly impress the goats.

After an hour’s class, the garden staff patiently allowed a sort of meet and greet, where people who hadn’t gotten much face time with the goats could hold the babies for a minute and get a picture. As I held a baby goat, cooing into its little ears and holding it so close I could smell its sweet, baby-like scent, I melted. I will never be a goat person, and they will never dethrone giraffes, alpacas, or any other of my very favorite animals, but there’s at least one goat that won my heart.

Goat Yoga tends to sell out, but there are still tickets available for April 16, 23, and 30.