It’s a goat’s world
In a year that has given us plenty to frown about, reporter Colin MacLean has chosen an article he can’t stop smiling about as my favourite of the past 12 months.
In a year that has given us plenty to frown about, I’ve chosen an article I can’t stop smiling about as my favourite of the past 12 months.
It was about my afternoon with “The Beach Goats,” a moniker that would serve as a great name for a hipster P.E.I. folk band — but I assure readers it does, in fact, involve actual goats. Goats in diapers, dresses, ribbons and strings of pearls, in fact.
The Beach Goats live with Devon Saila and her family in St. Chrysostome, in rural western P.E.I.
The family moved to the Island from Ontario several years
ago and started buying Nigerian dwarf goats soon after. They lived in a cottage by the water for their first year and the animals foraged
on the beach, giving them a very appropriate name.
A couple of the family’s small herd needed to be bottle-fed
and were kept in the house. They made themselves right at home and two of them, Daisy and Poppet, pretty much never left.
Saila started dressing them in dog clothes on a lark and eventually fitted them for leashes. She now dresses them up and takes them to visit school classrooms, the homes of friends, stores and pretty much anywhere else you might take a dog. She even has an Instagram and Facebook page to document their adventures.
The memory of sitting on Saila’s living room floor, feeding cereal to a baby goat in a blue dress and pearls still makes me grin, almost a year later.