At Ashely Bousquet’s piglet yoga classes, attendees practice Vinyasa yoga exercises with the help of some four-legged friends.
Unlike normal yoga classes, Bousquet said she invites piglets to roam around and cuddle with attendees while they practice certain Vinyasa poses.
The yoga sessions last an hour, with 15 minutes dedicated to taking photos and cuddling with the animals, according to one of the class flyers.
“We’re trying to not be distracted, but at the same time, how can you not be with these adorable little piglets,” Bousquet said.
But it’s not just piglets that join the attendees. Some bunnies and baby goats are there too, she said.
“That is going to be chaotic and in the most beautiful sense, because, how can you be sad with little baby animals just crawling and cuddling with you while you’re doing yoga?” she continued.
The animal element of the yoga classes helps combat feelings of anxiety and depression, Bousquet said.
A yoga instructor for just under a year, Bousquet said she got the idea to welcome small animals into her classes from her friends, some of whom raise baby goats on their mini-farms.
“I have a few goat lady friends. So now they’re all having pregnant mamas at different times and having babies at different times of the year,” she said. “So I’m like, ‘This is awesome because now we can kind of alternate classes based on who has the babies at the time.’”
But when one of her goat suppliers said they were having piglets too, Bousquet leaped at the opportunity to try something new. The yoga instructor said she’d heard of people doing baby goat yoga, but piglet yoga was far less common.
Even though these piglet classes run just a few times a year, they’ve become widely popular. All of Bousquet’s classes are fully booked, she said, including her newest piglet yoga class on May 17 in Spencer and her May 25 class at the Oakholm Brewery Brookfield.
Bousquet said she’d like to keep the classes “an annual thing,” and would love to keep it a tradition because it’s “super neat.”
There is a possibility to do more swine-related classes in the future, Bousquet said. As the piglets get older, the yoga instructor has thought about doing “pig yoga.”
“I was just doing some research and it’s definitely a thing,” she said. “So someone had already come up with pig yoga and I’m like ‘well, maybe then.’ I’ll kind of put my feelers out and I might do a bigger pig class in June. So we’ll see.”
