Woman takes pet pygmy goats to polling station

While some voters headed to the polls accompanied by their dogs, one woman from the Midlands took more unusual company as she walked to the polling station with her two goats.

Mary Mantom, 46, was accompanied by her four-year-old male pygmy goats Jean-Paul Goatier and David Hasselhoof to the polling station.

Ms Mantom, based in Stourbridge in the West Midlands, said: “We were joking earlier that they would vote Lab-aaa".

She added: "My husband Tom commented to somebody at the polling station that maybe you can tell how they vote by the colour of their leads because, just coincidence, one has got a blue lead and the other has a red one.”

She said she was inspired by the #dogsatpollingstations hashtag on X, formerly Twitter, to take her pet goats with her and her husband, Thomas Evans, 45, to the polling station.

The volunteer recruitment team leader said: “We often walk our two goats around the local area and the polling station is on our walk route so we just thought it would be fun to take the goats when we went to vote and put it on Twitter as 'goats at polling stations'.”

Mary said fellow voters were “very surprised” to come across the goats at the polling station but the pair received a positive reaction.

“People always comment on them when we walk around the area and tonight we came across many people on their way to the same polling station,” she said.

“There was a family that came out after voting who mistook them for dogs initially and then were amazed to see that they were goats.”

The two children of the family were “just amazed” and they stroked the goats and fed them some treats, Ms Mantom said.

“Everybody always wants to ask questions and it always provokes quite a reaction and often dogs quite don’t know what to do because they’re like, what the heck is that animal, so often people’s dogs go a bit crazy or they might be a bit scared,” she said.

Mary said the two goats have got personalities of their own, just like dogs.

“David is definitely the more confident, macho, alpha male, which fits with his name as David Hasselhoof, whereas Jean-Paul is more shy and sensitive in nature and a bit more nervous,” she explained.

“They’re generally very inquisitive, they love meeting people. We always carry treats in our pockets so we give them lots of treats to encourage them to be confident.”

The goats have never accompanied Ms Mantom to the polling station before but she would “absolutely” take them again.

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