DOING YOGA WITH GOATS AT DENVER COUNTY FAIR
Event has cleaners ready when things get namaste
Sisters Kate and Anna Lemons sat on their yoga mats, abandoning for a moment the pose they had been working on. A roaming cluster of goats approached.
Throughout the National Western Complex’s Stadium Hall on Sunday, a yoga class went on as delighted participants stopped practicing to pet or hold a goat.
Some of the animals were babies, some adults. They all seemed unimpressed by the attention they were getting and the smiles breaking out on the faces that surrounded them.
“I have never been this close to one,” said Kate, 19. “They’re very cuddly.”
The sisters were among 236 people who attended goat yoga, an event that brought 50 goats in contact with yoga practitioners on Sunday at the Denver County Fair.
Goat yoga has become a sensation across the country. National Western marketing director Karen Woods decided to bring the event to the fair, said Leah Labonte, NWS marketing coordinator.
Jennifer Kincaid, 34, grew up on a farm. When she was a child, she and her family traveled with about 20 goats and an assortment of other animals as they presented a traveling pony and petting show, she said.
“They have got great personalities. They’re like dogs,” she said of the goats. “They are very sweet, very funny. They are like little comedians.”
Kincaid brought her 11-yearold son, Erik ,to the class, telling him about her experiences with the animals as they drove to the fair, she said. Now “he wants a goat.”
One day, Erik said, he might get one “if mom has her way.”
As the goats wandered, they pooped and peed. No one seemed to mind.
One of them left “a little land mine,” by her mat, Kincaid said.
It was quickly cleaned up, she added.
“There were sanitation specialists around, so even if they
were pooping, they were cleaning it up,” said Claire Goodale, 27.
Mountain Country Nigerians provided the Nigerian dwarf goats for the event.
Owner Sydney Burt, 50, said she raises the animals on her property in Bennett. She shows and sells the goats from her farm, east of Denver.
The Nigerian dwarfs are a dairy breed. And although she sells some, she keeps many of the goats, making lotions and soap from their milk, she said.
She got interested in the goats after her children, members of 4-H, began raising them. “They’re easy to maintain, and they have little dog-like personalities.”
The goats are so docile that she is able to walk into the herd and milk them or trim their hooves “right where they stand,” Kincaid said.