Deputies handle all types of different calls. But a baby goat loose on the highway is probably a new one for most of them. That’s exactly what a group of officers with the Allen County Sheriff’s Department walked into earlier this month. A tiny goat kid was trotting along I-69 in Indiana with no owner. But it couldn’t be left to its own devices to get into danger. So the police decided to go pick it up and save it.
First, they had to catch it, though. That meant combing the shoulder of the interstate and poking through the brush. The goat turned out to be remarkably calm. It also wasn’t hurt and was not the least bit scared. That made it easy for a deputy named Thompson to scoop it up and take it to safety. But it needed a name. The group settled on the best name they could think of: Baby G.
With the runaway in hand and no one yet stepping forward to claim him, the deputies brought Baby G along for the search. Footage from the rescue shows the little guy riding in the cruiser, perched contentedly between an officer’s legs up front. He did not seem bothered in the slightest. If anything, Thompson looked more thrilled about it all than his passenger did.
By what looked like nightfall, they tracked down where Baby G belonged and got him home. Exactly how they found the owners was never spelled out, but Thompson clearly was not going to quit until it happened. Once the clip hit the internet, people lost it in the best way. Commenters crowned him the real G.O.A.T., greatest of all time, and the pun wrote itself.
Goats Are Born Escape Artists
Anyone who keeps goats could probably have guessed how this happened. They’re some of the most determined escape artists on any farm. They’ll repeatedly fence, gate, and gap until they find a weak spot. They climb, they squeeze, and they slip away the second a latch isn’t quite secure. A curious kid wandering off from a pasture and turning up somewhere it shouldn’t is a scenario farmers know all too well.
How this one reached a busy stretch of I-69 is anyone’s guess, though. It may have lived on a nearby property and squeezed through a fence, then kept moving until it met traffic. That’s the genuinely scary part of an otherwise sweet story, because a small animal on a highway is in real danger, and so is everyone driving past. A wayward goat is funny right up until it isn’t, which is why getting it to safety mattered so much.
What to Do If You Spot Loose Farm Animals on the Road
If you ever come across a stray goat, cow, or horse near a road, the instinct to chase it is the wrong one. A spooked animal will often bolt straight into traffic, which only makes a bad situation worse. The smarter move is to slow down, switch on your hazards to warn other drivers, and call the local sheriff or animal control. Trained responders, like the ones here, know how to corner a panicked one calmly and keep it from running.
Getting the animal back to its owner is its own small puzzle. Livestock rarely carries any ID, so deputies often go door to door near where it was found, or wait for a worried farmer to report one missing. In Baby G’s case, it worked out, and the kid was reunited with its family by the end of the night. Not a bad day’s work for two officers who could have written it off as someone else’s problem.