Goats are apparently smarter than anyone thought Researchers found that goats can learn to solve complicated tasks quickly and can remember the solutions they’ve learned for 10 months or more. The State Column, Justin Beach | March 26, 2014 Science is having to constantly reevaluate how we look at animal intelligence. Recent evidence has shown that crows, pigs and dogs, for example, are even more intelligent than previously believed. Most recently, researchers at Queen Mary University of London have found that goats can learn to solve complicated tasks quickly and can remember the solutions they’ve learned for 10 months or more. Scientists believe that this may explain the animal’s ability to adapt to harsh environments. Published in the March 26th edition of the journal Frontiers in Zoology, the researchers found that the goats could be taught to accomplish complicated tasks in order to obtain rewards. The goats were taught to pull a lever with their mouths and release it in order to access food in a box. The goats learned the tasks within 12 trials and were then tested on their ability to remember the task. At each interval the animals were able to remember how to retrieve food from the box within two minutes. “The speed at which the goats completed the task at 10 months compared to how long it took them to learn indicates excellent long-term memory,” said co-author Dr. Elodie Briefer, now based at ETH Zurich, in a statement. In the memory trials some of the goats were able to watch other goats perform the tasks first. “We found that those without a demonstrator were just as fast at learning as those that had seen demonstrations. This shows that goats prefer to learn on their own rather than by watching others,” said Dr. Briefer. According to the Agricultural Research Organization Bet Daga in Israel, goats are better able to adapt to a variety of harsh environments than most domesticated animals. A 1997 report from that agency states that “goats indigenous to tropical and subtropical environments generally performed better than other ruminants in terms of survival, reproduction and expression of their genetic potential for growth and milk yield. These advantages are emphasized in case of successive years of drought, a typical event in the dry belts of the subtropics. Low body weight (BW) and low metabolic rates per BW0.75 allow desert goats to maintain a frugal energy and water economy. Some of the desert breeds, such as the Bedouin goats, are able to reduce their energy requirements by as much as 65 percent in response to reduction in feed availability.” Strong problem solving abilities would certainly help with the animal’s ability to thrive in these environments. “Our results challenge the common misconception that goats aren’t intelligent animals – they have the ability to learn complex tasks and remember them for a long time. This could explain why they are so successful in colonizing new environments, though we would need to perform a similar study with wild goats to be sure,” said co-author Dr. Alan McElligott from Queen Mary’s School of Biological and Chemical Sciences. This is the first time that scientists have done serious research on how goats learn complex physical cognition tasks.
Posted on: Fri, 28 Mar 2014 05:40:19 +0000
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