Goats, in particular, are everywhere. They’re crashing bachelor and bachelorette parties, yoga classes, and, thanks to one Austin purveyor, boating trips. Drew Haas provides captained boat charters on Lake Austin for $225 per hour, with the option to include two goats for $196 extra. (Haas takes bookings through his company, the Party Goat, as well as the rental app GetMyBoat.) Of the dozens of charters he’s booked so far for the year—he’s scheduled one or two per week from the end of this month until September, a time period coinciding with the peak of the southern migration of neon-hued bachelorettes and their devotees—“almost every one of them has booked the goats.”
Haas credits the recent ubiquity of goat yoga, in which baby goats climb on yogis as they pose, with the grander boom in goat-inclusive events. The animals’ novelty helps Haas set himself apart in the area’s competitive charter-boat market. He grew up in Hallettsville, a town squarely set between Houston and San Antonio, where he’d spent a lot of time with animals as a kid (human). He and his girlfriend moved back there during the COVID-19 pandemic, and he bought her a baby goat for her birthday. His name was Peanut, and though he was aesthetically a goat, he was a dog in temperament and a sailor in his heart. Shortly thereafter, Haas bought a pontoon boat with a friend and decided to start a rental company. Peanut was sitting in the living room in a diaper as they tried to decide what to name the company, and the Party Goat was born.
Peanut came out on the boat often, even clip-clopping out onto the floating mat Haas would unfurl. Haas experimented with including him on rental charters, but he found that as Peanut got bigger, minding him and the guests simultaneously was too chaotic. Haas bought two more baby goats and brought them out on the boat, which went poorly: “I tried to catch them for two hours,” he recalls. Last summer was one of trial and error, as Haas experimented with diapers—the adult goats’ poop is rabbity and firm, easy to clean up should it present itself, but the kids’ is messier—and canopies, which are especially vital in Texas’s warmest months. (The goats are not aboard for longer than one hour, and there are spaces where they can retreat if they become overwhelmed by the attention or the heat.) Ultimately, Haas began outsourcing goats on an hourly basis from a Lockhart-based company called Goat Shenanigans. “We tried it a couple of times last year and it went great,” Haas says. “I was like, ‘Okay, let’s do this.’ ”
