Cheyenne Kids Go Wild Getting Their Own Urban Goats To Play With

CHEYENNE — Javier Garcia was riding his bike near Sun Valley Park when he happened to see something unusual going on in his neighborhood’s playground.

Someone was unloading all kinds of cute floppy-eared animals — goats. Then he saw something even stranger.

The goats were being handed off to random people — some of them kids like himself — and they were taking off with them, walking them around the park on leashes, like one might a dog.

Garcia rode his bike home as fast as he could go.

“Mom, we have to go quick!” he exclaimed. “They’re giving out goats!”

Javier, his brother Andreas and mom Lindsey were soon back among the crowd happily borrowing goats for a spin around the park.

“I’m really attached to this goat,” Javier told his mom.

She laughed, and agreed the goat was adorable, but she’s safe for now. Goats don’t fit into her homeowner’s association agreement.

She was free, however, to let her children love on the goats as much as they wanted at Wyoming Dairy Association’s first-ever goat Fun Run in Cheyenne last weekend.

The event is part of a more widespread effort to increase the visibility of both their organization and of goats in Wyoming.

Goat Big Or Goat Home

The group is headed up by Anne Larson, who owns some of the goats that were taken to Sun Valley Park.

She wasn’t so lucky when the big goat bug bit her. There was no homeowners association to save her. Larson had a very practical purpose in mind when she acquired a couple of Nigerian dwarf goats in 2019.

She wanted to train her border collies to herd cattle. The collies were just pups at the time, so she thought she’d use smaller livestock to train them. That way her collies wouldn’t be in quite as much danger while they were still learning.

The whole game plan changed one day when a friend’s granddaughter came over for riding lessons.

“She saw the goat and she goes, ‘That is not a goat.’ And I went, ‘Why not?’” Larson recalled. “’Because that is a Nigerian dwarf. That’s not a real goat. You need to come to my grandmother’s house and see real goats.’”

Karen Butler was the grandmother, and she’s locally known for her goats, the Mega Milkers.

So Larson did just that one day and visited Butler in the middle of March five years ago. She ended up going home with two of Butler’s floppy-eared Nubian goats.

Thoughts of training border collies evaporated after that. The goats were just too darned cute with those floppy ears to have dogs chasing them around.

“So, it never happened,” Larson said. “I re-homed the dogs to a friend of mine who does competitions.”

Now she has a herd of 33 goats — and no plans to slow down.

Goats Are Irresistible

Goats are highly social animals, a bit like dogs. But they also have a highly inquisitive and curious nature, a little like cats. And they just love people.

But be warned, they can be quite the little pranksters — escape artists, thieves, chewers of hair and clothes. Head butts are also not out of the ordinary.

Even the babies (kids) are not too shy about jumping up on a person’s shoulders or head. It’s the perfect ledge to view the world from. And obviously, the human must have meant for them to do that, or that person wouldn’t have been sitting so still amongst them, right?

And that’s how people came to have goats on top of their heads in Sun Valley Park last weekend. The people were sitting there, innocently petting a goat. Next thing they knew, one of the other goats had hopped on their head. It looked like some kind of weird goat yoga going on.

All of which amused Larson to no end.

“Not very many people know about dairy goats,” she said. “So that’s what we’re doing with this event in the park. We’re showing dairy goats to people and showing all of the cool things you can do with them.

“You can hike with them, you can dress them up, you can put them on an obstacle course, you can milk them, you can hold babies — they’re multifaceted!”

The goats will even happily participate in actual, organized goat yoga, Larson added.

“We have goat yoga at my ranch periodically,” Larson said. “And we do puppy yoga also.”

The Potato Chip Effect

Since being bitten by the goat bug, Larson has been on a mission to infect as many friends and neighbors as possible with the same bug.

So far, her tactics are working.

All she does is show her friends how cute the goats are. Their floppy ears, lopsided head tilts, and cute little pranks seem to do the rest.

“They’re like potato chips,” Larson said. “You can’t have just one.”

Knowing that, she will send a goat or two home with a friend. Just to try.

Pretty soon, that person winds up with a whole herd.

That’s how her friend and neighbor Kristy Wold went from four goats to 17 in just two years.

“They do make good pets,” Wold said. “They’re so fun, and the babies make it worth it.”

It is hard work in some respects, though.

“We’re milking them twice a day, and that’s a lot of work,” Wold said. “But I grew up around sheep, bottle-feeding baby lambs, and that was something I wanted my two girls to experience.”

Wold also has chickens, ducks, turkeys and a few sheep. But mostly she has goats. Floppy-eared, yoga-loving goats.

Be careful around them. Always remember that you were warned. No one has so far successfully ever eaten just one potato chip, nor had just one goat.

Contact Renee Jean at renee@cowboystatedaily.com

Renée Jean can be reached at renee@cowboystatedaily.com.