'Happiest Workers Ever'

"Goats are just adorable," Connie Rieper-Estes says with laughter in her voice.

But that's not how goats became her business. When her husband lost his job shortly before Christmas two years ago, the couple looked at what was available.

"Sometimes life throws a curve at you, and you have to take a good hard look at what you want to do," she says. "We wanted more fresh air, more time outdoors, more time working with animals in our lives. We asked ourselves, 'What do we have? Where can we go from what we have?' We had goats."

Rieper-Estes discovered that on the East and West coasts, businesses use goats to clear out brush and leaves around bushes and trees. And then, they trained theirs.

"Goats are led by their stomachs, so it wasn't very difficult," she says, laughing again. "The hardest part was teaching them to load up."

As it turns out, the goats love their jobs.

"They line up by the gate, they hustle to be first -- they're sad goats left behind," she says. "I mean, it's no surprise they're the happiest workers ever: You're just taking them to a big buffet!"

Goats, she continues, are "really smart, like shepherd dogs," but they do require special care. And that's how the couple started doing programs like the ones set for Saturday at the Shiloh Museum of Ozark History in Springdale. They've recently been given six goats that owners discovered weren't as good as pets as they'd imagined they would be -- making their herd total "way too many" at 28.

"People are just buying goats without researching them, and I want them to understand that if dogs and cats are like goldfish, goats are like tropical fish," Rieper-Estes says. "Goats are really sensitive, delicate creatures. Before you even get a goat, you have to have a goat-proof fence! If it won't hold water, it won't hold a goat! You need crazy tight fences for goats."

Then there's diet and shelter and how to handle the goats' stress.

"I studied up on them for two years before we even got our first goat," she says.

The class comes in two sections, and in between, there will be a "pop-up petting zoo" featuring four bottle-fed goats born in January -- Oreo, Snickerdoodle, Nutter Butter and Biscotti.

"You have to research how to keep goats," Rieper-Estes says. "They're not easy, simple pets. We'd love for people to come and just see a goat."

-- Becca Martin-Brown

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NAN What's Up on 06/17/2016