Goats Prefer You To Smile
Recognizing human facial expressions is a characteristic exhibited by domestic animals, such as the dog, for example. However, it appears that other animals, such as goats, also have this ability.
We already knew that sheep can recognize people, and now a study has confirmed that their close relatives also recognize facial expressions. Both qualities are very useful for pets dependent on man, and reflect great intelligence.
Goats prefer smiling
This is what the team of Alan McElligott, a researcher at the London University of Queen Mary, was able to demonstrate. In their experiments, it was shown that goats prefer to interact with smiling people.
For this study, the team of scientists used 20 goats, which were shown photographs of people’s faces with different expressions: on one panel there was an angry face, while on another there was a cheerful expression.
To understand how wonderful this discovery is, it is necessary to clarify that each species has its own way of communicating and exchanges of information between different species are very rare, as can occur with birds that help to look for honey.
Even among primates, who communicate through facial expressions, the meanings are different and a human smile can lead to distrust or even fear in these animals, something that goats do not, thanks to a completely different evolutionary context. This is because baring teeth is often a form of threat for many of these animals, like the Gibraltar monkey, for example.
What does that mean?
It was already known that these animals understand our body language, but it seems they can also understand our facial language. So this shows us that the dog is not the only domestic species adapted to communicate with us.
It is worth noting that pets do not suffer from other pressures from wild animals, such as predators, for example. Instead, they have the relationship with the human being as the great moderator of that relationship.
The domestication of the goat
This kind of ability to understand human expressiveness occurs with few species: primates can understand them to a greater or lesser degree, as they share this language, although the rest of the animals seem to acquire this ability through domestication.
The domestic goat is considered a subspecies of the wild goat. The origin of this domestication would be found in ancient Mesopotamia, from where they spread to the rest of the world.
Even today, the goat is still one of the most important animals in the Middle East, where domestic and wild varieties coexist in harmony. Perhaps this is one of the amazing abilities of goats that have also made them great companions to man for thousands of years.
