Three little piggies went to a yoga class.
Their human companions had a blast.
Wilbur, Charlotte and Bluey fit right into a growing trend of yoga with animals, adding some fun to the usual physical and mental wellness exercises at a class in central Massachusetts.
Photo: AP
Darting and strolling among the yogis making downward dog, crow and cobra poses, the piglets also dug up a backyard with their soft pink snouts as two rabbits and a goat named Munchie searched for the tastiest shoots.
The experience was well worth an about two-hour drive to Spencer, retired New Hampshire dentist Stacey Delbridge said, who participated at the exercise with her daughter.
“The best thing about the piglet yoga was, of course, the piglets and how cute they are,” Delbridge said with a jubilant smile. “They were funny, you know. Just when you were getting to a point where you needed a break, you had a great visitor come see you, and you could quit without looking like a quitter. Yeah. They’re adorable.”
Beyond Yoga & Wellness owner Ashley Bousquet said there is such demand that online registrations typically sell out within hours.
The classes begin with Bousquet inviting participants not to fret over interrupting their flows to interact with the piglets, who come from a friend’s farm.
“During the class you have piglets causing mischief and running on you, on top of you or cuddling with you,” Bousquet said. “It’s super cute.”
Amy Finkel brought her two daughters with her, smiling broadly while snapping photos of piglets as the girls hugged a rabbit.
“Seeing them so joyful and happy” was the high point, she said.
The low point?
“When it was over, because it just seemed to go so quickly,” Finkel said.
Practicing yoga with animals can produce unexpected benefits. If done with shelter animals, it might even encourage adoptions, said Rebecca Purchase of the Massachusetts Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals-Angell.
“Is yoga stressful to animals that join? It can be if it’s not the right animal,” Purchase said. “But for animals that really thrive being around people and getting to socialize with them, it absolutely can be a benefit.”
Finkel is a big fan of animal yoga. She said it helped keep her mind from wandering.
“I’m really focused on to what’s going on presently around me. And I think in today’s day and age, that’s very hard to do,” she said.
“I just wanted to sit with them,” Delbridge said. “I could have skipped yoga and gone just piglet. All piglet.”
Chinese authorities said they began live-fire exercises in the Gulf of Tonkin on Monday, only days after Vietnam announced a new line marking what it considers its territory in the body of water between the nations. The Chinese Maritime Safety Administration said the exercises would be focused on the Beibu Gulf area, closer to the Chinese side of the Gulf of Tonkin, and would run until tomorrow evening. It gave no further details, but the drills follow an announcement last week by Vietnam establishing a baseline used to calculate the width of its territorial waters in the Gulf of Tonkin. State-run Vietnam News
‘UNUSUAL EVENT’: The Australian defense minister said that the Chinese navy task group was entitled to be where it was, but Australia would be watching it closely The Australian and New Zealand militaries were monitoring three Chinese warships moving unusually far south along Australia’s east coast on an unknown mission, officials said yesterday. The Australian government a week ago said that the warships had traveled through Southeast Asia and the Coral Sea, and were approaching northeast Australia. Australian Minister for Defence Richard Marles yesterday said that the Chinese ships — the Hengyang naval frigate, the Zunyi cruiser and the Weishanhu replenishment vessel — were “off the east coast of Australia.” Defense officials did not respond to a request for comment on a Financial Times report that the task group from
Four decades after they were forced apart, US-raised Adamary Garcia and her birth mother on Saturday fell into each other’s arms at the airport in Santiago, Chile. Without speaking, they embraced tearfully: A rare reunification for one the thousands of Chileans taken from their mothers as babies and given up for adoption abroad. “The worst is over,” Edita Bizama, 64, said as she beheld her daughter for the first time since her birth 41 years ago. Garcia had flown to Santiago with four other women born in Chile and adopted in the US. Reports have estimated there were 20,000 such cases from 1950 to
DEFENSE UPHEAVAL: Trump was also to remove the first woman to lead a military service, as well as the judge advocates general for the army, navy and air force US President Donald Trump on Friday fired the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Air Force General C.Q. Brown, and pushed out five other admirals and generals in an unprecedented shake-up of US military leadership. Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social that he would nominate former lieutenant general Dan “Razin” Caine to succeed Brown, breaking with tradition by pulling someone out of retirement for the first time to become the top military officer. The president would also replace the head of the US Navy, a position held by Admiral Lisa Franchetti, the first woman to lead a military service,
RSS