Goats “smarter” than previously thought say scientists

Goats are smarter animals than they first appear, according to a new study by scientists from Queen Mary, University of London and ETH Zurich.

The researchers trained goats to retrieve food by pulling a lever and lifting a box. On average the goats managed to work out the solution within 12 attempts no matter if they saw another goat demonstrate the task in advance or not. When presented with the same problem ten months later, they managed to remember the solution within two minutes.

Published in the journal Frontiers in Zoology, in a paper titled “Goats excel at learning and remembering a highly novel cognitive task“, the team led by Dr Elodie Briefer and Dr Alan McElligott found that the goats learned the task “through individual rather than social learning”, noting in the conclusion:

“We propose that goat cognition, and maybe more generally ungulate cognition, is mainly driven by the need to forage efficiently in harsh environments and feed on plants that are difficult to access and to process, more than by the computational demands of sociality. Our results could also explain why goats are so successful at colonizing new environments.”