Researchers highlight the role of domestication in the emergence of this ability.
Next time you’re working with goats and want to lure them in with a tasty treat, just speak a bit louder! That’s according to a new study led by researchers in Zürich, which concludes that goats can follow the direction of human voices.
In the study, researchers tested 29 goats from a sanctuary in the UK using a hidden-object task. In a series of experiments, a human researcher hid behind a barrier out of the goat’s sight. Two identical containers were placed on either side, one of which was baited with food.
In the ‘reward-directed’ speech experiment, the hidden person spoke excitedly towards the baited container, while actually sitting closer to the empty one. In the second experiment, the researcher stayed completely silent, and in the third, they spoke excitedly but directed the voice away from both containers.
The team found that in the reward-directed experiment, the goats chose the food-filled container around 60 per cent of the time. This was well above the chance level and significantly higher than both control conditions.
While this kind of vocal comprehension has been proven in domestic dogs, it has not been found in chimpanzees. Researchers say that discovering this trait in goats suggests that domestication, or close proximity to people, plays a major role in an animal’s ability to decipher human communication.
The team concludes: ‘Some goats are able and spontaneously motivated to use the directionality of human speech to infer the presence and location of food. These data add to the accumulating body of literature examining this largely unexplored aspect of referential processing and provide further evidence that goats are capable of high sensitivity to human social cues.
‘While the exact roles of domestication and experience with humans in the emergence of this trait are unclear, further insight can be provided by broadening the taxonomic survey of these abilities to yet further domesticated and non-domesticated species.'
The study, Domestic goats can follow the direction of human voices to solves a hidden-object task, is published in Royal Society Open Science.
Image (C) Claudia Ayus/Shutterstock.
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