My goddaughter Nerys likes goats.

I like yoga.

Therefore, goat yoga was inevitable.

On January 3, I went with Nerys and her friend Ellory to the Los Angeles Arboretum. Our group of 20 gathered indoors, unrolling our mats in a bright, echo-y room that felt halfway between a yoga studio and a rec center about to host a kids’ birthday party.

The goats were already there when we arrived, milling around inside their pen, watching us with calm interest. Nerys and Ellory pressed up against the fence, immediately enchanted. I took a more cautious inventory of the space, mentally noting exits and wondering about the absorbency of my yoga mat.

Before we began, the instructors explained a few things. When we knelt, did downward dog, or lay on our stomachs, the goats might interpret these shapes as invitations to play. They might climb on us. This was not an unfortunate side effect. It was the point.

Goat yoga, we were told, was good for the goats. It socialized them. It exposed them to humans in unfamiliar positions. It helped them adapt to novelty.

At this point, it became clear that whatever was happening here was not primarily about yoga.

Is This a Crookie or a Cruffin?

Before arriving, I had been wondering whether goat yoga would turn out to be a crookie or a cruffin. Both of these are real pastries in Los Angeles, and both are mashups involving croissants.

A cruffin is a croissant baked in a muffin tin, combining the flaky layers of a croissant with the soft structure of a muffin. I have had one. It is fantastic. It is two good things that make each other better.

A crookie is a croissant stuffed with cookie dough. I have also had one of those. I found it gross. It was two good things that somehow made the other worse. The croissant lost its lightness. The cookie dough lost its integrity. Each undermined the other.

On my podcast, Fifty Words for Snow, where my co-host Emily John Garcés and I search the globe for unusual words, we borrowed these very real pastry terms and turned them into metaphors. A cruffin became our shorthand for two good things combined in a way that makes each better. A crookie became our term for two good things that, when merged, make both worse.

Goat yoga, it turns out, is not quite either.

As a petting zoo experience, it was tops. Joyful. Absurd. It delivered more delight per minute than any controlled animal encounter I’ve had.

As yoga, it was less successful. My poses did not deepen. My breath did not lengthen. My inner calm was repeatedly interrupted by hooves.

Plus, the instructor told us that if the goats felt comfortable enough around us, they might feel free to relieve themselves either on our mats or directly on our person. When goats pooped, the instructor called the storm of a hundred or so pellets that shot from the goat’s behind “blessings.” When they peed, it was “holy water.” We were encouraged to receive both with grace.

I doubted I possessed this particular capacity for grace, but, fortunately, I was never tested. The goats evidently did not feel especially comfortable around me, so both my mat and my person remained unsullied.

What Is Umwelt?

The reason goat yoga stayed with me has less to do with either the novelty of the experience or the instructor’s audacious spin of calling poo pellets “blessings” and more to do with a German word: umwelt.

Emily and Italked about umwelt on the New Year’s episode of our podcast. We learned from philosopher Jared Byas, author of Love Matters More, that umwelt comes from biology and was coined by ethologists studying animals in their natural habitats. It refers to the world as an organism can perceive it, based entirely on its sensory equipment.

A bat’s umwelt is built from echo. A dog’s from scent. A tick’s world is dominated by a single chemical cue that tells it when to drop from a branch onto a passing mammal. Each creature inhabits a complete reality, but not a complete world.

The crucial point is this: An organism cannot perceive what its senses do not allow it to perceive. Not because it is stubborn or incurious, but because it is biologically incapable of doing so.

Once you hear this, it becomes difficult not to apply it to humans.

The Goat’s World Is Not My World

Goats can see roughly 280 degrees around them, which means they experience the world as almost constantly approaching. This may explain why they frequently jumped onto our backs from behind, apparently baffled by our surprise. From their perspective, nothing unexpected had occurred.

This difference in perception showed up repeatedly. At one point, a goat jumped onto a young woman in class, and they both collapsed. The goat shook it off immediately and wandered away. The young woman stayed down longer, startled and recalibrating.

What struck me was not the fall itself, but what happened afterward. The goat did not seem to replay the moment. There was no visible self-reproach, no hesitation before rejoining the room, no sense of an internal narration of That was embarrassing or *That shouldn’t have happened. *The moment appeared to end for the goat when it ended.

The young woman, by contrast, remained in it. Her body was safe, but her attention lingered. She was still orienting herself to what had just occurred, to how it might have looked, to whether she had done something wrong. The same event had happened to both of them, but only one of them appeared to be carrying it with them.

Later, at home, I found myself reading about goats. As prey animals, I learned, goats are built for immediacy. Their nervous systems prioritize rapid response and rapid recovery. They orient, react, and reset. They don’t dwell in extended narratives about what just happened or simulate future outcomes in the way humans do. Their awareness is tuned to what is present, what is moving, what requires action now.

Which means that when the goat and the young woman fell together, they did not simply experience the same moment differently. They experienced different kinds of time.

That, too, is umwelt.

Humans Have Umwelts*,* Too

Our umwelts are shaped not just by biology, but by culture, language, history, trauma, privilege, and experience. Two people can stand in the same space and genuinely not inhabit the same world.

This helps explain something that often feels moral or psychological but is actually perceptual. People do not just think differently. They see differently.

Recognizing this does not excuse harm or erase responsibility. But it does challenge the fantasy that if everyone simply had the right information, they would automatically agree.

What Goat Yoga Gave Me

Goat yoga did not make me better at yoga. It did something stranger and more useful. It reminded me that reality is always being filtered and assembled, moment by moment, by the bodies and minds experiencing it.

Once you notice that, it becomes harder to assume that your way of seeing is neutral, complete, or universal. That recognition does not solve disagreement, but it does create a little more space for curiosity.

And right now, that may be the most useful stretch any of us can practice.