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Meghan Daum
The Blessings of the Goat Yoga Revolution
I tried it and I kinda loved it
The first rule of goat yoga is you do not talk about goat yoga. It’s too embarrassing. What does it say about you that you paid $30 to take a one-hour vinyasa flow class in which small goats climb on your back and run through your legs? What does it say about our world that on a Sunday morning you can drive to an acting studio on a Hollywood side street and pack in with dozens of other people doing sun salutations while farm animals dart — and occasionally defecate — between your legs and on your feet?
Is it that contemporary urbanites long for a connection with nature? Is it that the viral video genre known as “ interspecies interactions” (think of a puppy and a piglet cavorting in an animal sanctuary or of Koko the Gorilla caring for kittens) is even better in real life? Or is it that yoga has become so commonplace that it takes livestock to spice things up?
For me, it’s all of the above, especially the last one, since I’m in that apparently tiny minority of people who actively dislike yoga. I find even a warrior pose so difficult as to be actually stress-inducing. (I’ve been told that the difficulty is a result of being hyperflexible, which suggests that maybe I don’t need it at all.) In any case, during a recent trip to Los Angeles, the yoga capital of the capitalist world, I decided that I could maybe bring myself to take a yoga class if there were some element of novelty to it. I wasn’t alone. When I showed up for a 10 a.m. goat yoga class on a furnace-hot morning, I found at least 30 yogis in line outside a garage-like acting school on a Hollywood side street. This was one of several venues used by Hello Critter, an enterprise operated by Michelle Tritten, a former fashion designer who’s kept pet goats for decades and decided two years ago to incorporate them into yoga classes in a local park. Goat yoga originated in Oregon in 2016, the idea being that human yoga postures create a natural playscape for goats, who are remarkable climbers that step lightly and nuzzle gently. Classes can be found in many American cities, as well as Australia and Italy, and it should surprise no one that Hello Critter is but one of a handful of goat operations in Los Angeles. Tritten’s other goat-related offerings…
