After I wrote my paean to backyard goats and the noble, friendly character of goats in general, I received something I didn’t expect—universal agreement. Readers came out of the closet/stall/barn to tell me how their hearts, too, have been captured by these animals. My favorite letter came from a professor, a towering scholar who, frankly, would strike me as Least Likely to Harbor A Secret Love of Goats. I haven’t received his permission to use his name, but here’s a good chunk of what he wrote:
I was also in love with a goat. Her name was Euphoria, and she danced every morning when I let her out of her pen, kicking her feet right as her head went left, and vice versa, for about 30 seconds every morning. Then I milked her. She didn’t have to be female. I probably would have loved her if she were a man. It was a great experience to be a goat herd. She lived with me and a menagerie of other animals when I lived in the Santa Cruz Mountains as a maintenance worker trying to keep the Jewish “Camp Swig” from falling down around our ears in the mid-1970s. … that period at camp was an especially dear period of my life, and Euphoria taught me some of the most important lessons about simplicity that I have every learned – and that stay with me even ‘til today.
Unrelated, I came across this YouTube video on the Internet, of a Pismo Beach goat the dances and surfs with her owner. Her name might as well be Euphoria.