One man, one goat

Comedian Nik Rabinowitz has a thing for goats. Not in a dodgy way, he hastens to add. He just likes them and isn’t put off by their diabolical eyes or habit of butting innocent people.

Goats have featured in several of Nik’s performances, most notably in a show titled One Man, One Goat at the 2007 National Arts Festival in Grahamstown. Having borrowed a goat named Stoffel for the duration of the festival, he was mortified when his prop began to behave like a delinquent rock star, keeping the neighbours awake, butting Nik with increasing abandon and using his rented digs as a toilet. For the record, they had separate beds.

But that wasn’t the end of Nik’s goat period. Invited to MC a charity fundraiser at the Goatshed Restaurant at Fairview, he was introduced to a Saanen dairy goat named Patrick, a character notable mainly for his impressive overbite and willingness to pose for publicity pictures. Then there’s a short video from 2015 in which Nik tells the story of a goat named Bhola, who supposedly dreamt of becoming an actuarial scientist and managed to secure a scholarship to study at the University of Cape Town. (Editor’s note: We fact-checked this anecdote and found no evidence to support it.)

Nik also describes sharing a halcyon childhood on Eagle’s Nest Wine Estate in Constantia, Cape Town, with a variety of pets and farm animals, including at least one goat,.

If he were to acquire a new pet, what would he choose? Either a pig or an African grey parrot, Nik says. Because pigs are highly intelligent, and African greys are psychic, so they know what your partner is thinking.