Goat parkour: Reddit's r/parkour sub suggests goats are the new cats.

The Internet Has Discovered Goat Parkour, And It Is Glorious

The Internet Has Discovered Goat Parkour, And It Is Glorious

Future Tense
The Citizen's Guide to the Future
June 19 2014 8:36 PM

Goat Parkour Is the Best Evidence Yet That Goats Are the New Cats

goat2

Are goats the new cats?

Their Internet fame has been mounting for a while now, like a dexterous ungulate scaling a craggy peak. It started with lolgoats, a blatant ripoff of lolcats that frankly did little to hint at the enormous latent potential for goat-centric Internet humor. Fortunately, things picked up a bit with goat editions of famous pop songs. Then came goats yelling like humans, and all bets were off.

Will Oremus Will Oremus

Will Oremus is Slate’s senior technology writer. Email him at will.oremus@slate.com or follow him on Twitter.

Advertisement

Modern Farmer magazine held Goat Week and fired up a GoatCam. BuzzFeed launched a goat vertical. The Swedish game developer Coffee Stain Studios scored a hit with a title called Goat Simulator, which is now the subject of a riveting making-of documentary. A hedge-fund manager is pitching goats as a solution to Detroit’s blight. Even Amazon is hiring goats.

That may all just be prelude to the latest sensation that’s about to sweep the Web: goat parkour. Some of the finest examples are already being collected on a Reddit sub aptly titled r/goatparkour, which was brought to our attention by the vigilant journalists at the Daily Dot. “Don’t Kid Yourself: Goat Parkour Is the Best Thing Online,” the Dot’s Greg Seals bleated.

That might be a slight exaggeration: I’ve yet to see the goat video that can quite compare to this classic footage of a cat in a shark costume chasing a duck around on a Roomba. But something tells me we still haven’t hit peak goat. At the very least, however, cats can no longer be quite so secure in their perch as rulers of the viral-animal kingdom. And I owe a certain prescient colleague an apology for not taking her seriously when she insisted several months ago that goats were the next big thing.

Here are just a few of our favorite clips and gifs of goats freestyle walking and bouncing off of things, including each other. For more, goat on ahead and hoof it over to r/goatparkour.

Previously in Slate:

Future Tense is a partnership of SlateNew America, and Arizona State University.