When I was four, a white goat walked up to me while I was playing on my swing set in the back yard. The area we lived in at the time was still rural, but slowly transitioning into a suburb. There were still small farms scattered among the strip malls and middle-income housing developments. The goat must have gotten loose and gone wandering.

I was up on the slide and the goat just walked up and looked up at me expectantly. I climbed down and petted it for a bit then went into the house to ask my mom for something I could feed to the "horse" in the yard. (Hey, I was four and the goat didn't have horns or a beard like all the pictures of goats I'd seen.)

Thinking I was playing with an imaginary horse, mom gave me a carrot which I took out and gave to the goat who was nibbling our lawn. The goat ate the carrot and I went in to ask for another.

After I came back in and asked for a third carrot, mom scolded me. She thought I was wasting carrots. (I didn't eat raw carrots back then.) When I insisted there was a horse in the yard who was eating the carrots and got upset, she took my hand and we marched out to the back yard.

Almost as soon as we walked out, she saw the goat with a bundle of honeysuckle vines hanging from its mouth like spaghetti. There was a patch of woods behind the house and a lot of dense greenery grew at the edge. The goat looked at us quizzically as it chewed. Mom was stunned into immobility for a moment, then pulled me back inside. We watched the goat eat honeysuckle for a while and it eventually left.

When my dad got home, mom told him what had happened. He laughed but she didn't think it was funny. What if the goat had hurt me? Where did it come from? What if it came back? What if an even more dangerous animal showed up? From then on, I wasn't allowed to play outside unless mom was with me. In between her housekeeping and TV shows, I didn't get a lot of time outside.

A couple of weeks later, my dad spent the weekend putting up a fence of wooden posts and hardware cloth. I was allowed to play outside alone again. I never saw the goat again, though, and for a while I was mad I didn't get to keep it.

This is just viral marketing for a talking animal buddy road movie about a sassy goat and an uptight llama.

I'm sure a lot of people are like "WHY DIDNT U CAL THE COPS NISTEAD OF FLIMING IT ANIMAL KILER" but I'm kind of glad he didn't. His calm and cool demeanor is exactly what they need. They're probably lost, scared, and the worst thing that could happen is a cop car pulling up and scaring them towards the freeway. Goats aren't too hard to catch, but Llamas, well I think we all saw that video.