(Photos courtesy the Lethbridge Corn Maze)

By Justin Goulet

Snuggle some goats at the Lethbridge Corn Maze

Jul 1, 2020 | 8:00 AM

LETHBRIDGE, AB – How would you like to cuddle with some goats?

The Lethbridge Corn Maze is offering snuggling sessions with baby goats to help reduce stress for anyone hit by the effects of COVID-19.

Each session is one hour long for groups of up to five people for $30.

Attendees can also stay an extra half hour to enjoy the other animals on-site and check out the different activities available.

Owner and operator of the Lethbridge Corn Maze, Theo Slingerland, said he was inspired after seeing the goat snuggling initiative’s success at other farms, as well as the popularity of goat yoga.

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“We know that in the past, people love those goats [at the Lethbridge site] so we looked into it a little bit more and looked at how we could set it up, especially now with COVID-19. So, we decided to build some pens that are far enough separated and tried to make a go of it,” he told Lethbridge News Now.

“If you pet a goat, [and] they look at you or they fall asleep on your lap, some people [have] told me that their blood pressure went way down in the [time] they spent with the goats. It’s a great thing to do.”

Slingerland said they have 49 baby goats on-site.

Four separate areas have been set up, with three or four goats each to snuggle with people.

“We make sure that everybody is six feet apart, we have tape on the floor and the signs up and everything, and we also have hand sanitizers in the barn and outside on the yard. The goat snuggling and the petting zoo – we have a pretty big yard so we should be able to handle a lot of people,” he said.

“The goat snuggling pens themselves are 10 feet apart, so there’s four pens and there’s 10-foot spacing in between each one of them and in between sessions, we give it an hour and a half to two hours rest as well, so that we should be okay with eliminating or minimizing risk.”

Slingerland added that they have handwash stations and have upped the amount of cleaning at the site.

HELPING A LOCAL CAUSE

A portion of the proceeds raised will go towards the Lethbridge Food Bank. Goat snuggling sessions can be booked online via the Lethbridge Corn Maze website.

“There’s a little story with that,” he said.

“The Lethbridge Food Bank of course gets a lot of food donations and some of them are perishable, so if they can not get rid of them on time, they actually have a place called ‘The Goat Shed’ and once a week or twice a week, we pick up some of that food for the animals that we can feed to the animals. It’s expired for people, but many of the animals can eat it, [and] some of it can be fed to our goats.”

THE CORN MAZE

As for the popular corn maze, Slingerland said the goal is to have the attraction open on July 31.

“We do have to see how things are going,” he said.

“At the moment, it should be no problem as far as we can tell. We do have some safety measures in place, and we might have to limit our numbers later on in the fall if it gets really busy, but we’ll have to see where it goes in that time as well.”

He told Lethbridge News Now that the design for this year’s maze is an ice hockey player, accompanied by the Lethbridge Hurricanes logo.

“The logo is probably a little bit smaller, and it’s separate from the hockey player. So, the hockey player is quite big, it takes up about one-third of the maze and the logo probably [takes] a quarter of the maze, and then the rest is all the other paths that we have.”

The Lethbridge Corn Maze yard and petting zoo are open Fridays and Saturdays from 10:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m.

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