Why goats aren’t silly billies at all
Along with slugs, sharks and snakes, goats have long suffered from a poor public image. You might almost say that the goat is the Duke of York of the animal world.
For centuries, the goat has been a symbol of sin, which is why the devil is so often depicted with a cloven hoof. lechery, in particular, is seen as goatish. ‘The goat is a lascivious and butting animal who is always burning for coition,’ reads the goat’s entry in a 12th century bestiary.
over the next 800 years, goats also gathered a reputation for being daft. In my childhood, when we were pushing and shoving and pulling faces instead of sitting still, we were always being told to ‘stop acting the giddy-goat’.
As if this were not enough, goats are also associated with irritation. ‘He’s getting my goat’ means ‘he’s annoying me’, perhaps deriving from the tendency of a goat to butt in. But there are signs that the goat’s terrible public image may be undergoing a re-branding. Researchers conducted an experiment with goats, and concluded that they may not be so daft after all. nine goats from the Buttercups Sanctuary in Boughton Monchelsea, Kent, participated in the experiment. A researcher sat in between two buckets, one containing food, the other empty.
As the goat approached, the researcher pointed a finger in the direction of the bucket with the food in it. once the goats had got the hang of it, they started to go where the finger was pointing.
The lead scientist, Alan McElligott, of the University of Roehampton, concluded that ‘goats are smarter than their reputation suggests’. Furthermore, ‘these results show how they can perceive cues and interact with humans even though they were not domesticated as pets or working animals.’
This raises a number of important issues, not least whether Mr McElligott himself is an example of nominative determinism — the idea that a disproportionate number of people pursue careers suggested by their surnames, so that, for instance, someone born with the surname Bossy will end up becoming a headmaster, or Mr Cope will be a social worker.
Was Mr McElligott drawn to his current field of study because his name sounds so like giddy-goat? More importantly, the goings-on at Buttercups Sanctuary have made me reconsider goats. If they are really so intelligent, these goats may have come to a quite different conclusion about the experiment.
From the goats’ point of view, the test may well have demonstrated that, under controlled conditions, human beings are intelligent enough to be able to point to buckets containing food, proving to the goat community that ‘humans are smarter than their reputation suggests’.
Scientists say that, until now, only dogs, horses and African elephants have been shown to understand pointing. Can this be true? As a child, I used to attend the chimps’ tea party at Chessington Zoo (now disappointingly re-named Chessington World of Adventures) and an awful lot of pointing used to go on, to great comic effect.
Aged six, I myself pointed my right forefinger through a cage at Chessington marked ‘Racoon: Do not Touch’ and had it swiftly bitten. The nurse at the first-aid centre did her best to make me feel guilty by tuttutting as she bandaged up the cut, but I now realise that I had, in my little way, conducted a pioneering experiment, and successfully shown that racoons, too, respond to pointing.
And what about pigs? A few years ago, I watched a television documentary in which a pig was able to demonstrate a rudimentary understanding of a home computer, poking at the keyboard like a pro.
Obviously, the pig’s front trotter was too chubby to pinpoint individual letters of the alphabet with any great accuracy, and he had no understanding of apostrophes at all. But he nevertheless made all the right movements, and his face had the intense, furrow-browed expression of a regular computer buff.
It’s hard to believe that a pig wouldn’t beat a goat hands-down in any bucket-pointing contest.
But, for now, the goat has improved its public image no end. The findings of the McElligott Report will ensure that we no longer see the goat as simply lecherous, irritating and daft. If it works for goats, why shouldn’t it work for humans?
If I were HRH the Duke of York, I would rush down to Buttercups Sanctuary ASAP.