We all love keeping goats, but there are certainly times when it’s harder than others.
There are also definitely some goats that are more difficult than others, and it can’t be denied that goats have some of the most individual and unique personality of any domestic animals.
Many of us may find ourselves wondering whether goats can also have that pervasive issue affecting humans—ADHD.
So, can goats have ADHD?
The simple answer, then, is sort of.
Goats can certainly be hyperactive, and they can have trouble maintaining their attention on a single thing.
But no animal behavioral psychologist has ever sat down with a goat and definitively diagnosed such a disorder.
Let’s look further into this.
What is ADHD?
Firstly, let’s just establish what ADHD is in the first place.
It stands for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and is extremely common among humans.
It is most often noticed at a young age, but it also is very frequently missed until much later in life.
We may tend to assume it is something children exclusively suffer from, particularly at school, but it is a problem for many people well into their later lives.
For our purposes, the most important thing to remember about ADHD is that it is heterogenous.
This means that it manifests in a great many ways, and there are a great many things we can describe as symptoms of ADHD.
Obviously, broadly speaking, it includes issues with maintaining attention for a long time—but this isn’t always accurate.
Sometimes, the issue is that people are able to maintain their attention, but not on the actual task at hand.
The other issue is hyperactivity, restlessness, and a need to fidget.
This is a huge oversimplification, of course—it is not just about being fidgety, but literally needing to be active and stimulated at all times.
So, with this basic overview of the disorder in mind, can animals show signs of it?
Can animals have ADHD?
The simple answer is yes.
It is most commonly observed in dogs, since behavioral issues are a big deal for dogs.
Exhausted owners seek veterinary or behavioral help for their dogs, and thus there are many documented cases of dogs having “ADHD”.
But part of the problem is our rather loose idea of what it means to have ADHD.
A lot of people think of it as just being hyper and having trouble maintaining attention.
But it’s a lot more complicated than that, as I’ve tried to stress.
Generally, vets are not going to diagnose animals with ADHD, because that is a disorder affecting the human mind, and while other mammal brains are highly similar, they’re not precisely the same.
But certain animals can definitely exhibit behaviors and personalities which we might describe as exhibiting signs of ADHD.
Let’s look at goats in particular.
Can goats have ADHD?
There are two ways of looking at this question.
The simple way is just looking at the experiences of goat owners and seeing how their goats are different from one another.
Some may be especially hyper, without the impetus or desire to maintain their attention on a single thing for any length of time.
Meanwhile, the rest of the herd is perfectly able to focus and do not have the same type of hyperactivity.
So, for this person, if that sounds like what you’re experiencing, then there’s no actual valuable difference between this, and the actual disorder that humans experience.
The other way we can look at it is perhaps more empirically sound, though may appear to deny the individual’s experience.
As I said, from a clinical point of view, it’s very hard to say with any certainty that goes experience ADHD.
This is a name for a human disorder, and not often applied to animals.
The point I am trying to make is that for practical purposes, the distinction may be meaningless to you.
Your goat may not be able to get a diagnosis from a vet, but they are still extremely hyper and struggle to focus.
So, what to do with such a goat?
What to do with a goat that has ADHD
The best thing to do is going to be to speak to a specialist.
Any vet should have advice for how to handle the goat’s hyperactivity, and it may even be that there is something simple bothering them that is causing them to act in this way.
Your vet should be able to identify the problem.
Depending on the severity of the problem, though, it may just be that you have to accept this is the way your goat is.
As I’ve tried to stress, goats are highly individual creatures with deeply complex personalities, and it’s pointless trying to browbeat your goat into being a different kind of goat.
ADHD is a complex issue that we are only beginning to fully understand even in humans.
Saying definitively that goats can experience precisely the same disorder is very difficult, and there have certainly been no peer-reviewed studies on the subject to answer the question from an empirical point of view.
For your everyday experience, though, you can certainly have goats that seem hyperactive and difficult to control.