Goats are much more fascinating creatures than we really give them credit for.
They are really interesting with many things you might not know about them.
Today, we’re going to give you a rundown of some of the most fascinating goat facts we could find.
So, buckle up to learn more about goats than you ever thought you might!
Goat domestication
One of the most interesting things about goats is that they were, as far as we can tell, one of the first animals human beings domesticated.
Estimates vary slightly, but our best academic research shows that goats were domesticated as early as 10,500 years ago, possibly as long as 12,000 years ago.
This is really staggering, and the only animal that shows earlier evidence of domestication is dogs.
We’ve known the potential of goats for a really, really long time.
They even seem to have been domesticated simultaneously in two places: the Euphrates River valley in modern-day Turkey, and the Zagros mountains of modern Iran.
Goats are not grazers
Possibly something that aided their incredibly early domestication is the fact that goats are not grazers, and they don’t rely on grass like sheep and cattle do.
You might assume that goats are closely related to sheep, and thus have largely the same diet.
While it is similar, there is an important difference.
Where sheep are grazers who eat primarily grass, goats are foragers.
This means they like to roam a wide pasture and find a wide variety of vegetation to eat.
They might eat a bit of grass, but not much.
Climbing trees
You might also tend to think of goats as being rather lumbering, inelegant creatures.
They spend their time on the ground and don’t get around much.
However, this is not the case at all.
While the biggest goats may have trouble with this, many breeds of goats are adept at climbing trees and perching on the branches to eat the leaves.
It’s really a sight to behold, so go and have a look for a picture of it now—words will never do it justice!
How many stomachs does a goat have?
If you’ve never learned about farm animals in this depth, then you’ll probably just assume goats, like us, have a single stomach.
In fact, this is not the case at all, and a goat’s digestive system is highly different from our own.
In addition to being foragers, goats are also known as ruminants.
This classifies them as part of a group of animals that chews their food, swallows it, regurgitates it, and then chews it up some more.
A lovely image, I know!
So, for this complex mechanism, goats actually have four compartments in their stomachs.
Goat pupils
If you’ve ever looked a goat in the eye, you were probably quite struck at the shape of its pupils.
Unlike our round pupils, goats’ pupils are rectangular, stretching from one side of their eyeballs to the other.
There is an important reason for this.
Because goats are herd and prey animals, they need robust threat detection to be able to survive in the wild.
Their rectangular eyes give them a much wider range of vision than ours do, so they can spot predators coming from a long way off.
Goat meat
It’s probably a good guess that you’ve never eaten goat meat—or, at least, haven’t eaten it many times.
You may be surprised to learn, then, that it’s actually the single most commonly consumed kind of meat in the world after pork, poultry, and beef.
Goats are one of the most abundant domestic animals for a variety of reasons.
This means that goat meat is readily available everywhere and indeed very cheap as a result.
So, this makes it a great choice for poorer parts of the world, but it is also just considered a delicacy in many places, such as Jamaica.
But it’s not just their meat that everyone is consuming.
Goat milk
2% of the worlds milk is goat milk.
For people who cannot drink other types of milk such as cows milk, goat milk is a great alternative.
Highly sociable
One thing we really don’t appreciate about goats is their complex social brains.
They are highly intelligent creatures, and though you may have seen petting zoos or other such places where a single goat is being kept on its own, this really is actually far from ideal for them.
Goats are some of the most sociable domestic animals, and they are used to living in large herds in the wild.
This means they can get sad without sufficient companionship, so you should never keep a single goat on its own.
They also have a lot of personality and that doesn’t just affect their desire to socialize.
Picky eaters
We’ve all heard the old tale about a goat eating a tin can—or just the whole idea that goats can and do eat anything.
In fact, this is actually far from true, and they are highly picky eaters.
They will eat a lot of stuff that might seem unpalatable to us, but they actually have quite sensitive lips and must be careful about what they eat.
They certainly do not and cannot eat tin cans—although they may try to get at any glue that is keeping the label on.
Generally, though, they are quite fussy.
Inquisitive and intelligent nature
Due to a combination of the fact that they are picky eaters and nomadic ruminants foraging for a variety of foods, goats have evolved into a highly intelligent and inquisitive species.
Again, we might often think of goats as being less than terribly intelligent, but they are generally actually really smart.
They like to investigate things and are really curious about new things.
Usually, they just wonder if it’s going to be food—but they are nonetheless highly inquisitive.
Meaning of sneezing
You may have heard goats sneezing on occasion and wondered if they sneeze for the same reasons we do.
While they do, to an extent, sneeze to clear their sinuses and their mouths, it actually plays a very specific and important social and herd role, too.
Sneezing is a way of signalling danger to the herd, without necessarily alerting the hunting animal that they are aware.
When one goat sneezes after noticing a predator with its rectangular eyes, the rest of the herd can be on high alert to find out what the danger is.
Dislike of water and rain
Despite their inquisitive nature, goats generally still do their best to avoid water whenever they can.
If you’ve seen goats during the rain, you will have noticed they like to take shelter until it stops.
They also generally avoid getting their hooves wet in streams and will go around if they can.
Communication
We mentioned the meaning of sneezing, and that leads to a wider discussion about how goats communicate.
Communication is essential for herd animals, and goats have quite a complex array of messages they can communicate with one another.
They will bleat a lot, and this is a basic noise just to check in with each other and be sure everyone is still present.
They can make a variety of other noises to indicate other things, too, such as danger, hunger, or that they’ve found something interesting.
Wattles
If you’ve ever seen a goat close up, you may have noticed strange fleshy bulb like things hanging off their necks.
You might have been confused about what they were, and don’t worry, you’re not alone in that.
They are called wattles, and though not all breeds have them, some have very prominent wattles.
In modern goats, these wattles serve no purpose—they are an evolutionary hangover from a bygone age.
They are believed to have been the remnants of a gland that the goat no longer needs.
Some goats have two and some have one.
Different kinds of goat
When we think of goats, most of us probably think of the domestic variety.
The kind of goat you see on a farm or a homestead, that you can milk and grow for meat or companionship.
But there are multiple goat-adjacent animals that, while not precisely the same as domestic goats, still fall into roughly the same genetic category.
Ibexes, for example, are goat-like creatures that have much larger horns and are not widely domesticated.
The term includes several species across Eurasia, North Africa, and East Africa.
Mountain goats, too, are not strictly the same as domestic goats.
So, there are many kinds of goats, both wild and domestic.
Different names for goats
In terms of domestic goats, even though they are a single species, you’ve probably heard a few different names thrown around for them over time.
These names mean a variety of things.
Buck means an adult, mature male—doe means an adult, mature female.
Like our own children, goat offspring are called kids.
So, a kid is any sex of goat until it is mature and fully grown.
Then you also have wethers, which are males castrated at a young age.
Does that have recently kidded are called nannies.
Mythological significance
If you’ve studied any world mythology in your life, you’ve probably come across a goat deity or ethereal creature of one kind or another.
They have massive mythological significance across the world.
We in the west are likely most familiar with them as fauns and satyrs of Greek and Roman mythology.
They are half goat, half human creatures which serve many roles in the mythologies.
But the Norse god of thunder flies through the sky on a chariot drawn by two goats.
In Hindu mythology, Naigamesha is the goat-headed deity associated with children.
Goats play such a role in our mythology likely due to the fact that it has been such an enormously long time since they were domesticated—they have always been with us!
Among the first animals brought to America
Given that they’ve been around for so long and we have so mastered their domestication, it is not surprising that they were among the first animals that the colonizers from the west brought to the Americas.
Columbus brought goats with him on his voyage in 1493, and later Spanish explorers established large domestic goat populations in North America in the south-western U.S. in the 17th Century.
US presidents who owned goats
Since goats were first brought here to the U.S., they have also been the companions of many presidents throughout the years.
Lincoln is probably the most famous.
He had many pets, including turkeys, horses, and rabbits.
But he also had two goats, famously named Nanny and Nanko.
Benjamin Harrison, the 23rd president, owned a goat humorously named His Whiskers.
This goat would often pull his children round the Rose Garden in a cart.
Even U.S. presidents love goats.
Did goats discover coffee?
Another semi-mythological story revolving around goats is that it was they who discovered coffee.
The story goes that a goat herder was moving his goats through a pasture to graze one morning when he noticed them ravenously eating the beans from a tree.
They seemed highly energetic afterward, so he tried some of the beans for himself—and thus coffee was discovered.
While this is a story we will never be able to verify, it is entirely possible!
Fiber goats
Though we might think that most of the fiber we get from animals comes from sheep, as a matter of fact, goat fiber is a hugely profitable industry around the world.
Indeed, cashmere itself even comes from goats, as do many other kinds of goat fiber, or mohair.
Many of these fibers are considered highly luxurious and sell for large amounts of money throughout the world.
Regional “accents”
Goats even appear to show differences in “accent” across different geographical locations.
The variation is often slight, but goats clearly do demonstrate differences in cadence and rhythm of their bleating and noise making depending on where they are from.
There are probably complex evolutionary reasons for this, with the vocal chords of different goats adapting in different ways depending on where they live in the world.
How many breeds are there?
Today, goats are one of the most numerous domestic animals on the planet—there are around 450 million of them worldwide.
Naturally, a lot of breeding has gone on, and today, there are more than 210 different and recognized distinct goat breeds worldwide.
Some of the most common are Boer goats, Alpine goats, and Angora goats, but there are all sorts of breeds emerging to serve all different kinds of purposes.
What animals are goat’s closest relatives?
We often associate farm animals with one another even if they aren’t closely related.
Many people tend to think that goats and sheep are closely related, but they’re actually further apart than you might think.
Goats are more closely related to other ruminants, like deer and antelope.
These animals also chew their cud and like to forage for a wide range of foods.
Seasonal breeders
Lastly, goats are also seasonal breeders.
They tend to mate in the autumn, or late summer, so they are pregnant over the winter and give birth to their kids during the start of spring.
This gives the kids the best chance of survival with the most amount of warm weather during the early period of their lives.
Many other animals can breed year round, but not most goats.
Goats really are an endless well of fascination, then.
For further back in time than we can, as individuals, even begin to conceive, they have been a human companion providing us with friendship, meat, milk and furs.
They have rich inner lives of their own, with complex emotional brains and social hierarchies.
There’s always more to learn about goats, and even with everything we’ve discussed here, we’re only scratching the surface.