Farm life

Goats Love People

GOATS ARE HIGHLY SOCIABLE AND BECOME VERY TAME WHEN HANDLED GENTLY FROM A YOUNG AGE. THEIR NATURE IS KEY TO THEIR CHANGING ROLES IN SOCIETY

Although goats are a minority farm species in Europe, they are an important resource in Asia and Africa, reaching one billion head worldwide. Traditionally, goats have ranged over wide areas, often in difficult terrain, due to their unique climbing and foraging skills. Their thrifty and efficient digestive system and adaptable nature renders them essential to agriculture in the face of climate change. However, rapid changes in farming practice and changing trends in goat keeping have enforced large unnatural changes on their lifestyle. For example, 50% of commercial dairy goats in France are housed indoors full-time. These goats have been bred to produce unnaturally high volumes of milk. On the other hand, recent trends see goats kept as pets or for managing the landscape. We need to ensure that they can handle such changes, and provide environments that meet their biological needs. For this reason, researchers have been studying goat cognition and how they relate to their human handlers. The aim is to understand how the goat mind works well enough to ensure that the facilities we provide them with meet physical and psychological needs imposed by goat nature. Already, we have found that small barren pens and featureless barns can lead to boredom and frustration. In response, we can provide climbing and play equipment and access to outdoor grazing. In addition, we find that goats form friendship bonds, need the companionship of other familiar goats, and are stressed by changes in herd membership. How goats perceive humans Goats that are not used to people or who have had bad experiences with them view us as potential danger and can take a long time to tame. However, kids that have grown up with regular pleasant contact with people tend to treat us as friends, providers, and perhaps even honorary herd members. Being herd animals that rely on others for company and safety, goats are very sensitive to facial expressions, posture, and emotion in the bleats of herd members. Recent research indicates that they are good at reading humans too. Alain Boissy, research director at INRA, studies goats at an experimental farm near Poitiers. He explains, ‘Goats watch us a lot more than we watch them. From the moment you enter the barn, you’re detected, identified and analysed. Goats can pick up on your posture, your smell, and above all your facial expressions. Before you can spot a couple of animals who aren’t doing well or showing signs of illness, the goats will have already examined you from head to toe. They behave differently from one day to the next. Not because they are in a good or bad mood, although that can happen, but because your mood changes. They will have done their psychological assessment before you do.’ Alan McElligott, Jan Langbein and Christian Nawroth have devoted a large part of their careers to studying goat cognition and several of their experiments highlight how goats perceive us and communicate with us. They have found that goats are sensitive to our body position and will seek our attention by approaching us from the front. They are not discouraged if our head is turned away, perhaps because goats themselves see well out of their peripheral vision. However, they are more likely to approach people with their eyes open and body facing in their direction. If they are after food, they tend to wait until we are looking at them before they beg. If we are not paying them attention, they may stare at us or even paw at us. These observations show that goats are attentive to our body posture and face. A further study revealed that they preferred to approach people with smiling, rather than frowning, faces. Communicating with goats Dogs and horses have evolved over many thousands of years to work alongside people and have developed a deep understanding of human body language. Recent studies show that goats have similar skills. Alan McElligott explains, ‘From our earlier research, we already know that goats are smarter than their reputation suggests, but these results show how they can perceive cues and interact with humans even though they were not domesticated as pets or working animals.’ His team had been testing if goats understand what we mean when we point with a finger. They found about half the goats in the study would approach a bucket if an experimenter was pointing at it from 30–40 cm away. However, if the experimenter was sitting by one bucket and pointed to another 90 cm away, the goats tended to approach the experimenter. Other similar tests confirm that goats understand pointing to some extent, but focus more on what the demonstrator is touching or standing by. Christian Nawroth commented, ‘This

study has important implications for how we interact with farm animals and other species, because the abilities of animals to perceive human cues might be widespread and not just limited to traditional companion animals.’ Learning and getting help from people Goats who want help accessing feed are known to alternate their gaze between the foodstuff and a potential helper. This was tested by placing a treat in a Tupperware box and sealing the lid, so the goat could see but not access the treat. After trying to access the treat, many goats alternated glances between the experimenter and the box, often approaching the experimenter. When goats have learned to trust us, they often follow our lead, trying plants that we offer them, and following us to new pastures. They can also learn fromThey can also learn from watching us do things, so be careful not to watching us do things, so be hop over fences or make bolts too easy to careful not to hop over fences or open. When goats were faced with sheep make bolts too easy to open hurdles in front of a box of treats, they naturally tried to climb over or reach through it, without success, until they worked out how to circumnavigate the obstruction. When an experimenter demonstrated the way around the hurdles to the treat, goats watching him copied his route rather than trying out their own ways. In short, we are influential and can teach our goats through clear demonstration, but they are great at trialand-error learning too. Goats have learned to pull ropes and drop levers to operate a box that delivers treats. Some can operate a computerised water-delivering machine by pressing one of four buttons, each labelled with a different shape. As the shape moves to a different button each time, the goats had to learn which shape delivers. There is also evidence they enjoy such puzzles, probably through a sense of achievement from solving the challenge. From what little evidence we have so far of how the goat mind works, we can see that they need to keep occupied, have social contact, and are keen to communicate with us. They are sensitive to our mood and emotions and take pleasure in friendly human contact.

By Tamsin Cooper

Tamsin Cooper is a smallholder and writer with a keen interest in animal behaviour and welfare

www.goatwriter.com

Sources: - Into Farm Animals’ Minds (Arte film): vimeo.com/473797887/8b1867429e - Dr. Alan McElligott: www.alanmcelligott.co.uk - Dr. Christian Nawroth: christiannawroth.wordpress.com