This Oregon Couple (and Their Goat) Star in a New Discovery+ Series

The opening credit of The Bond, a four-part docuseries now streaming on Discovery+, depict a string of questionable behaviors. Over a music that’s not essentially by OneRepublic however is in spirit completely by OneRepublic, viewers are handled to a number of static tableaus: a faceless stranger petting an alligator, one other getting pleasant with a wolf, one other nonetheless going full Creation of Adam with a primate. I’d let most canines on planet earth lick my face with out batting an eye fixed, however watching all this unfold, I couldn’t repress my internal survivalist. “Please don’t contact that wolf,” I mentioned to my tv mid-sequence, giving my greatest panicked-but-patient preschool trainer.

The issue, I suppose, is that I simply don’t have the bond—a “deep bond with creatures from throughout the animal kingdom” that serves because the present’s unifying theme, per press supplies. Two individuals who undoubtedly do have it? Grants Move couple Chad and Cate Battles, who star in The Bond‘s third episode. Below the deal with @argosyodyssey, Chad and Cate have amassed greater than 20,000 Instagram followers, with whom they share dispatches from their photo-friendly life in a transformed 1976 Airstream Argosy. Theirs is not simply any van life state of affairs, although—the Battles share that Airstream with their goat, Frankie, who’s handled to an in-episode reveal (no spoilers) that rivals that 2013 Taylor Swift meme for sheer bleating pleasure.

Ever since she was a toddler, Cate has felt a connection to goats. “They’re so inquisitive. They love exploring, they love nature, experiencing new issues, tasting new issues,” she says. “[Frankie] needs to take a look at what’s across the nook. She needs to do that, she needs to eat that—it is so much like me.” Cate satisfied Chad to deliver Frankie into their household in 2014, whereas the couple was nonetheless residing with his kids in North Carolina. Two years later, after these kids left for faculty, the Battles determined to surrender their three-bedroom home and dwell on the highway, which meant bringing Frankie together with them. “We have been shocked how simple the transition was from residing a stationary life to touring,” Cate says. “It got here to her naturally. She beloved it simply as a lot as we did.”

Some individuals would possibly fairly meet resistance from family members after they announce they’re going to take their goat and themselves on an indefinite tenting journey, nevertheless it was not so for the Battles. “I feel all of our family and friends know that Chad and I’ve all the time been a bit bit totally different,” says Cate. She’s a full-time artist; Chad is a theater college grad who carried out as knowledgeable clown for 10 years. “We have type of executed our personal factor and by no means actually went with a crowd, so I do not suppose it was stunning to them for us to dwell in a 22-foot trailer with a goat.”

When the couple shouldn’t be at house in Grants Move, the place Cate runs an artwork studio, Chad does odd jobs, and the entire household frequents a gastropub referred to as The Attractive Goat, they spend about three months a 12 months hitting up a wide range of pure wonders. (Frankie loves the Southern Oregon Coast and California’s Alabama Hills particularly, for his or her excessive bluffs.) In early 2021, the household was on a several-week stint at Utah’s Capitol Reef Nationwide Park with Chad’s kids after they obtained a fateful Instagram DM from a producer for The Bond. 

“At first, I used to be like, ‘Oh, they’ve in all probability contacted tons of of different individuals, they’re not going to choose us,’” Cate says. “However positive sufficient, they adopted up, and administrators got here out, producers got here out, after which come June, we have been on a monthlong highway journey with a movie crew across the West.”

Within the episode, the Battles journey in a loop: from Grants Move to Wyoming, then up and again by means of Idaho (the place they attend a memorable, Nomadland-adjacent goat proprietor meetup), and down the coast to Gold Seaside, the place they scatter the ashes of Frankie’s former companion, the beloved household canine. Alongside the best way, they make for impossibly entertaining firm. Cate is a blast of goat-loving sunshine who nonetheless comes throughout very tethered to planet earth, and Chad is a deadpan hoot, at one level utilizing the bow for his musical noticed on Frankie’s horns and dubbing it “the horn part” at “goatchella.” (His favourite campfire noticed music, for the report, is “Wonderful Grace,” “as a result of it is easy.”)

Regardless of their star-making performances, the pretty non-public pair have not needed to cope with any prompt fame. “It isn’t precisely like we stroll down the road and anybody acknowledges us,” says Chad. If anybody does get acknowledged, it is Frankie, which is just about the identical because it was pre-Bond—the goat is the axis round which their world spins. The couple hasn’t been to a film in years, as a result of somebody has to stick with Frankie always, and he or she’s the plain inspiration for the majority of items they obtain. “Lots of people ship us goat dish towels, unusually,” says Chad; Cate is the proud proprietor of extra goat socks than she will be able to rely.

Their recommendation for viewers at house hoping to goat up their very own lives? “It is crucial to do your analysis,” says Cate. “Goats require a number of care, a number of consideration, a number of enrichment. In any other case they get bored and sad and lonely.” She suggests both shopping for a couple of goat so as to add to the household, or scheduling a number of play dates, as she and Chad do for Frankie. Smaller females are lowest-maintenance, says Chad, and in the event you plan to show your goat right into a mountaineering buddy, begin ’em early. 

And most crucially, for any fur-inclusive households hoping to hit the highway, the couple advises in opposition to getting too fooled by the high-gloss van life social media aesthetic. “Do not consider full-time journey as being an Instagram put up. As you noticed within the episode, there’s all the time one thing taking place, one thing breaking. It isn’t the best way everybody thinks it’s,” says Chad. Certainly, early on within the episode, they hit a bump and unsecured cupboards fly open, fridge contents spill out, and the affect on the tiny toilet is greatest left to the creativeness (or maybe not). When the Battles park and assess the harm, they shrug and chuckle by means of it, superhumanly unfazed, then return to petting their beloved Frankie.

“It may be difficult at occasions,” Chad admits. “However very rewarding on the similar time.” Within the nicest method doable: the bond is a hell of a drug.