![]() ![]() And they've got long-term memory as well. The other thing I know from farmers who farm goats is that they need special, extra-robust fencing because goats are very good at getting out. Sheep behave like the stereotypical view of sheep. But people who've carried out research on sheep and goats say that goats are always exploring and going off on their own. Many people assume goats are just the same as sheep. If you sit and watch a group of goats interacting, there's always lots of stuff going on, calling to one another, sniffing each other, laying down and touching one another. They're always investigating anything new in their environment by smelling and looking.Īnd they're very sociable. And the pitch in their call was more stable in the positive state it didn't go up and down as much as in the negative states. They're more likely to point forward in a positive state rather than negative state. During these experiments, we filmed the goats to see what their behavior was and had a microphone record them.Ī key parameter was the way the goats point their ears. The goat next door just watches the other goat eating for five minutes. Then we bring food to one of them, but not the other. In one of the negative conditions, we put two goats in adjacent pens. You sort of perk up, creating a mildly positive state.įor the negative states, the experiments are really short. The animal feels a bit like how you feel when somebody is bringing you your dinner. We shake some food in a bucket a few seconds before we walk toward the goat and feed it. To create a positive state, we use what we call food anticipation. ![]() The key aspect is putting goats into what we consider mildly positive or negative situations. We were definitely curious: What does a happy goat look like? We spoke to McElligott to find out. The research was conducted over summer months because "goats hate cold weather and particularly hate rain," so they're more cooperative subjects in warm weather. So McElligott and several colleagues ran a study to see if they could find helpful clues for farmers. But it is more difficult to identify those positive states." "You would want to have animals in positive states. "Keeping animals is not just preventing them from being in negative states," McElligott explains. That costs money in terms of medicine and vet bills."Īnd it's not enough to know when your goat's mad. They need to know whether their herd is in a "positive" or "negative" frame of mind, he says: "If animals have chronic stress, they're far more likely to get ill. Goats and Soda What's In Our Name: Why Goats? Why Soda? ![]()
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