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Goats are often thought to be unintelligent, but a study in 2014 found that domesticated goats are actually quite intelligent. The study tested their ability to learn a complex foraging task and found that 9 out of 12 goats successfully learned the task. Surprisingly, it was found that goats learned through individual learning rather than social learning. Additionally, the goats showed good long-term memory, as they were able to solve the task much faster in subsequent tests. This study suggests that domestication does not affect the cognitive abilities of goats. Did you know that domestication of animals is known to reduce brain size in many species? Because of this, we might expect that domestic animals would show a decrease in cognitive abilities. There is another belief that domestic ungulants, like sheep and goats, are not intelligent. In 2014, a study was done that tested social and physical conditions and long-term memory of a domestic ungulant, the goat. Before I tell you about the study, I am going to define a couple of terms. According to the study, domestication is the process of increased dependency between humans and animals. An ungulant is a hooved animal, and in this study, they are talking about goats. Cognitive abilities are how the animals process information. Finally, social learning is behavior that is learned by imitating others. Goats have a movable, split upper lip that helps them move things around. They are very selective browsers and grazers, and they do very well in many different environments. They often live in large social groups. Domestic goats have smaller brain mass than wild goats, probably as a result of domestication. Because domestic animals rely on people to get food, it is possible that their abilities to forage and find food and to remember food locations could be reduced. So you might expect domestic goats would have a harder time learning the foraging task and remembering where they found the food. This study looked at whether domesticated goats could learn a complex foraging task and if they had long-term memory of it. They also looked at if the cognitive abilities they showed were because of social learning skills. All goats were trained to do the two-step task the same way. Some were exposed to a clearly visible demonstrator goat in a nearby stable that performed the task three times before the learning trial, and some were not. As a result, 9 out of 12 goats successfully learned the two-step task, suggesting good cognitive abilities. Among these goats, the number of trials needed to learn the task did not differ between goats that had a demonstrator and those that did not. This suggests that goats learned through individual rather than social learning. They also found that during the 10 months of the study, the goats were able to solve the task much faster than the first test, indicating that they have a very good long-term memory. Domestication does not seem to have an effect on their cognitive abilities. So as the title of this article says, goats excel at learning and remembering a highly novel cognitive task.
