Midvale • Candace Yocum and her two pygmy goats had lived in harmony in Midvale for more than two years when the city’s code enforcers came knocking with an ultimatum: Marshmallow and Frankie had to go within 30 days.

The city hadn’t received any complaints about noise, smell or abuse. But Yocum learned that pygmy goats were considered livestock under city code — not pets — and were therefore not allowed in residential zones.

“I panicked because I thought, what am I going to do?” said Yocum, 48. “Where am I going to take them? They have nowhere to go and they only know me.” She got them almost as soon as they were weaned, “so they think I’m their mom.”

That’s when Yocum’s mother suggested she call Midvale City Councilman Dustin Gettel, whom she’d met as he knocked on doors during his campaign in 2016.

He agreed to take on the task of changing the ordinance, and it became a “labor of love” over the next 10 months. Earlier in March, the City Council voted unanimously to adopt possibly a first-of-its kind pygmy goat ordinance that recognizes the animals as pets.

“It was a slow go in the very beginning,” Gettel said, noting that passage required a lot of education for council members who were unfamiliar with pygmy goats. “There’s kind of a stigma that they’re just barnyard animals rather than more traditional pets.”

Midvale’s code now defines pygmy goats as under 27 inches high and 100 pounds at maturity. It allows those in residential areas to have two — and only two — pygmy goats because they get lonely and loud by themselves but have a tendency to fight in threes. The new rules also set enclosure requirements that seek to protect the goats from weather and predators and impose aesthetic requirements.

Councilman Paul Glover initially worried the goats would be loud or create a nuisance. But he said he ultimately decided to vote for the ordinance after working through a number of changes with Gettel that he believes will allow Salt Lake County Animal Services to enforce the requirements.

“They’re kind of considered a barn animal and they’re kind of not,” Glover said. “They’re kind of a gray in between. If you have good people taking care of them, then I don’t think we’ll have a problem. If we don’t, we’ll have a problem.”

Yocum is the first to acknowledge that caring for the goats isn’t easy. They’re mischievous, have a tendency to chew on anything they can find and often try to escape.

“It’s not like you can just put them in your yard and hope,” she said.

Still, Gettel has argued that responsible owners like Yocum shouldn’t be barred from keeping them as pets.

“We should all be so lucky to be Candace’s goats in our next life,” he joked. “You could have a neighbor who doesn’t take care of their goats, but you could have that with a neighbor who doesn’t take care of their dogs or their cats or anything. The point is to be a good neighbor, and Candace has definitely been a good neighbor.”

‘Little friends’

The knock at the door about the pygmy goats wasn’t Yocum’s first run-in with code enforcement. The Midvale resident — who said she has always been drawn to animals and also has three dogs and a rabbit — once got in trouble for owning a pet raccoon she’d saved after it fell out of a tree.

“He would come in and watch TV and stuff,” she said with a wry smile. “And then code enforcement came down and was like, ‘Is that a raccoon?’ And I’m like, ‘I don’t know … is it?’ They’re like, ‘You can’t have a raccoon. They’re illegal in Utah.’”

She found the raccoon a new home but that felt more difficult to do with her pygmy goats.

She bought Frankie and Marshmallow after her brother died in 2014, and “it was almost like a healing thing” to take care of them, she said. Soon, they became as much her pets as her dogs are.

“When I go to work and they know I’m getting ready to leave, they cry,” she said. “And then when I come back, they know when I’m coming to the street .... They know when I’m awake and they’ll say, ‘Good morning’ and go crazy at the fence, and I feed them and take care of them.”

Yocum isn’t the only one who has an attachment to Frankie and Marshmallow.

Neighbors come from around the block to pet the pygmy goats and to bring them any extra food, Yocum said (the goats will eat almost everything except meat, cheese, chocolate and avocados). And, in the summer, she’ll walk the goats to neighbors’ houses to mow their lawns.

“All of her neighbors had handwritten letters to me: ‘Please let her keep the goats,’” Gettel said.

Marshmallow and Frankie are rescue animals, Yocum said. She described Marshmallow as “domineering” while Frankie, who was born with deformed horns and seems to have some mental disabilities, “just wants everybody to hug her.”

“They’re something else,” Yocum said, petting Marshmallow lovingly as he sunned himself on a table in her front yard. “They’re just like little friends.”

‘Freedom to love the pet they love’

Sometimes people ask Gettel why he bothered to spend so much time on the goat ordinance seemingly to help just one resident. But he sees it as bigger than that. For him, the pygmy goat ordinance is about land use rights, code enforcement policy and even the way government operates.

The goats “haven’t been a problem,” he said. “No one has ever complained about them. So, to me, it was just like, is that what we want our city to do is to go around and try to find problems? Or should we look at issues and just evolve with how we treat our code enforcement?”

The issue was personal for him as well, rooted in his upbringing in the Pennsylvania countryside and having a lot of “goat friends” as a kid.

Now that Midvale has paved the way for pygmy goats, Gettel said it’s possible other cities may follow suit. Cottonwood Heights considered a similar pygmy goat ordinance last year, but the measure didn’t have the support necessary to pass, according to Councilwoman Tali Bruce.

That doesn’t mean she wouldn’t bring the ordinance back, though, if a resident was passionate about the issue.

“I feel like if they follow the steps to make sure the goat is happy and well cared for and not in a situation where they’re going to be noisy, that people should have freedom to love the pet they love,” she said. “So I would bring [the ordinance] back if there was citizen interest.”

And while Gettel said he’s heard from a number of pygmy goat lovers who joke that they should move to Midvale now, he doesn’t anticipate there will be an influx of the animals.

“It kind of regulates itself,” he said. “They’re not easy pets to have, so it’s not like every single person is going to have pygmy goats.”

He also doesn’t anticipate the ordinance will balloon to include more animals.

“No cows!” he called to Yocum as he finished petting the goats and latched her gate behind him.

“He’s always restricting me,” she joked with a smile.