A Member of a Famous NFL Family Keeps Blind Ponies, Arthritic Horses and a Goat Hotel in Vermont

TR Risk at the goat hotel in Stowe Credit: Jeb Wallace Brodeur

Marshmallow was chewing on orange daylilies when I pulled into the driveway, while his lady friends — Hershey, Cookie and S’mores — grazed on an expensive salad of terraced landscaping. “The Sweets,” as the pygmy goats are collectively called, eat well at their 20-acre home in Stowe, but the flower beds are officially off-limits. So Antonio Rodriguez, the groundskeeper everyone calls Tony, silently shooed them away with what must have been a Jedi mind trick.

A native of Mexico, Rodriguez grew up with livestock, and all 14 animals on this farm seem to trust him intuitively. The miniature ponies or “minis” — Thunder, who’s blind, and his one-eyed son, Lightning — trail behind him like he’s the Pied Piper. So do the Sweets, who otherwise obey nothing but their own insatiable curiosity.

“I love animals,” Rodriguez said with a thick accent and gentle smile. “They follow me everywhere.”

“My kids joke that ‘If there’s a donkey that walks backwards, it’s gonna end up with you.'” Terry Meis

I came to this beautiful mountaintop farm following an unusual lead. While I was reporting a story about the Phoenix, a new art gallery and performance space in Waterbury, cofounder Joseph Pensak suggested I interview his business partner, artist and furniture maker TR Risk, whose name alone piqued my interest.

“You have to go see his goatel,” Pensak added.

“Go tell?” I asked, confused.

“Goatel,” he clarified. “As in a hotel for goats.”

The goatel exists, I discovered, though it’s nothing you can book through an online travel site. It’s a shelter for goats that is also a physical embodiment of the property owner’s love of animals, especially those that have fallen on hard times. Terry Meis, their generous and quirky benefactor, belongs to a famous National Football League family more commonly associated with back-to-back Super Bowl wins than with eyeless equines and unruly ungulates.

“The odder they are, the more I love them,” Meis told me about her menagerie of rescued creatures. “My kids joke that ‘If there’s a donkey that walks backwards, it’s gonna end up with you.'”

I was greeted on the farm by Risk, whom Meis brought to Vermont from Philadelphia in 2020 to renovate a large 19th-century barn and convert it into dwellings for animals and humans. The horse and pony stalls are now on the ground floor, the human quarters upstairs. The goats seem to go wherever they please, especially when doors are left ajar, though they prefer the impressive views of Mount Mansfield from the loft.

Since completing work on the barn, Risk has done other projects for Meis, including converting a dilapidated chicken coop into an outdoor bar and firepit. A cool hangout spot, it appears to be the only building on the grounds not routinely inhabited by critters.

Risk, a self-described “freestyle creator” who’s known Meis for years, scored the ideal assignment in Stowe, one that blends his expertise as a builder, high-end furniture maker and artist with his fondness for animals.

“I’ve had some amazing projects in my career, but this one,” he said, clutching his chest, “is forever in my heart.”

Building animal enclosures wasn’t previously his forte, though Risk was once hired to craft one for an unusual house pet.

“I worked for a pig once,” he said. “He was an indoor pig, and he was enormous … But my son’s in college, so I’ll build a zebra cage if you need one.”

Like everyone else at the Meis farm except Rodriguez, Risk knew little about goats until the animals arrived last year. He crafted the goatel from scratch, with little planning or forethought.

“It’s an intuitive process,” he said. “Nobody knows really what it’s going to be. I just know what [function] it’s going to serve.”

Naturally, the goats had their own plans, which involved trying Risk’s patience as much as possible.

“They’re extremely mischievous and extremely fun to be with,” he said as we entered the “goat zone,” where Risk is building a new, larger goatel. “They steal my tools. They take my bucket of screws and purposely knock it over. I bend over to use my saw, and they bite my butt. I’m like, ‘Seriously, Marshmallow?'”

The first goatel is no bigger than a tool locker, because the goats were tiny when Meis adopted them. She’d heard that a farm in southern Vermont was overrun with goats and needed to thin the herd.

Terry Meis feeding her miniature horses at home in Stowe Credit: Jeb Wallace Brodeur

Initially, Meis planned to take just two females, but she was told she’d want a billy goat to “keep the girls in line,” she said. She chose Marshmallow, an all-white male, to accompany Hershey and Cookie, both black-and-white females.

“But then S’mores, the tricolor one, was just sitting there by herself,” she said. “So we had to take S’mores, too.”

The goatel started as just a shelter from the wind and rain. Then Risk added a long ramp that ascends to a roof deck, where the goats can survey their domain and scope out the next flower bed to raid. At first, Meis worried they might fall off the slanted roof, but the goats proved sure-footed.

At 12 by 13 feet, the new goatel has more than double the living space of the first, with windows, ledges for perching, a covered porch, and a decorative front door that Risk built eight years ago for a different project, using antique walnut and gingko. Outside, he’s adding a jungle gym, tire swings, a bridge to the OG goatel and a second roof deck.

“I want it to be organic and one of a kind,” he said, “just like this property.”

No pigs live on Meis’ farm, but its connection to pigskin becomes obvious once you know where to look. One clue is hearing the names of some of the Labrador retrievers Meis has rescued over the years, including Franco and Steeler — the former a nod to Pro Football Hall of Fame running back Franco Harris.

Meis is a granddaughter of Art Rooney, founder of the Pittsburgh Steelers, and daughter of Pat Rooney, one of five brothers who now own the NFL team.

Though she’s lived in Stowe only since 2019, Meis attended the University of Vermont and has roots in the state that go back decades. Her father used to own the Green Mountain Race Track in Pownal, which operated from 1963 to 1993. For a time, she noted, it was the only racetrack in the country that ran both horses and greyhounds.

Meis now serves on the board of directors of the North Country Animal League in Morrisville. Her own farm isn’t a nonprofit; she just rescues animals when they’re the right fit.

The goats are relatively recent additions compared with Steeler and Franco. Franco, who didn’t know how to live indoors when Meis met him, had an autoimmune disorder called myeloencephalitis, or inflammation of the brain. Though the dog wasn’t expected to survive, Meis said, “I put my heart and soul into him,” and he lived another decade.

Peaches, one of her five current Labs, has congenital kidney dysplasia. Knowing the dog wasn’t likely to get adopted, Meis brought her home. Ditto for Mittens, a feral cat from NCAL that, Meis was told, would never allow humans to touch her. Now, Risk routinely brushes her fur and applies her flea collars. In return, Mittens keeps the barn free of mice.

After showing us the goatel, Risk led us to the horse paddock, where Zarro and GQ, both enormous Hanoverians, galloped up to receive carrots and apples. With fly masks covering their faces, they looked regal, like the stallions of medieval knights charging into battle.

“When I moved up here, I knew nothing about caring for horses,” Meis said. But soon after buying the property, she befriended Tracy Goldfine, then-executive director of NCAL, and agreed to take in a horse named Mari, which was missing all of its teeth. Mari arrived on the farm about the same time Meis did.

One morning, Meis recounted, she discovered Mari shivering and emailed Goldfine to ask what was wrong.

“She’s cold,” Goldfine replied.

“So what do I do?” Meis asked.

“Put a blanket on her.”

Acquiring horse sense took time, Meis confessed.

“Tony would watch me jackass my way up and down every day — cleaning the pasture, feeding the horse, sweating,” Meis said. “He was like, ‘Terry, do you know much about horses?’ I said, ‘Does it look like I know much about horses?'”

Eventually, Meis hit her stride. When she learned that horses are happier with a companion, she adopted Zarro, a champion jumper from Martha’s Vineyard that could no longer be ridden due to arthritis.

After Mari had to be euthanized, Zarro needed a companion. Meis learned about a retired jumper with health issues from a friend whose daughter worked at Cornell University’s Oxley Equestrian Center, and GQ joined Team Meis.

Lightning and Thunder, the miniature ponies, had their own previous careers in a traveling circus. When their elderly owner couldn’t care for them anymore, he surrendered them to the Dorset Equine Rescue.

“I went down and met them and was like, ‘Yep! They’re coming with me!'” Meis said.

Learning to care for the animals, she’s experienced plenty of barnyard baptism by fire. Last winter, when Lightning got dangerously ill, the vet instructed Meis to take him to an emergency equine hospital in New Hampshire. At the time, Meis had no horse trailer. Unable to find the sick pony a ride on short notice, she loaded him in her minivan, IV lines and all. While Lis Viilu, her property manager, drove the van, Meis rode in back with the mini.

Lightning recovered and was soon back with his father. Their reunion was a heartwarming moment that encapsulated why Meis does this work.

“The first time I introduced Lightning back to Thunder, they squealed and squealed. You would have cried, they were so missing each other,” she recalled.

To borrow a phrase from Steeler Nation, that’s an immaculate reception.

The original print version of this article was headlined “Special Teams | A member of a famous NFL family keeps blind ponies, arthritic horses and a goat hotel in Vermont”