I was out tending the goats with my son the other day when he started asking me a lot of questions about goat’s legs and hooves.
Hooves fascinated him, since they were like feet without toes—or were they just two big toes?
He was very interested in how a goat’s legs compared with our own, and how they compared with other animal’s legs.
It might sound strange—but everything’s new at that age, so I just roll with it!
He asked me one question I could answer in no uncertain terms, though.
How many legs does a goat have?
Goats have four legs. All species of goats are quadrupeds, meaning they bear their weight on four limbs. Each leg has one hoof, which is like having two toes on each foot–given that goats have cloven hooves. All goats have four legs.
So, the answer is really just as simple as it would seem.
Goats have four legs, each with a single cloven hoof forming two toes.
This is more often a matter of debate than you might think, though.
Some might call their forelegs arms; some might call their hooves feet instead of toes.
Either way, though, goats anatomically and taxonomically have four legs.
Let’s look further into this.
How many legs does 1 goat have?
1 goat has four legs.
No ifs, no buts, no way around it—by every classification, understanding, taxonomic categorization, every single metric you could apply, a goat has four legs.
They uphold their weight equally on four legs that run perpendicular to the ground.
Of course, goats are often born with defects which affect the number of legs they may have.
Goats born with three legs are frequently able to live happy and healthy lives, with a bit of human support.
So, a goat with three legs is not unheard of—but it’s not the norm.
That goat is ‘supposed’ to have more than three legs.
Goats can also be born with defects resulting in many legs, but, again, this is not normal.
Very few of these goats survive.
1 goat, then, has four legs.
That might seem obvious and intuitive to most people, but there are more than a few disagreements (in the layman’s discourse) about whether or not we can call all four of a goat’s limbs legs.
Do goats have arms?
Some would perhaps argue that goats do not have four legs, but instead have only two—their back legs.
This comes from a fundamentally different basic understanding of how we classify parts of mammalian skeletons, though.
In a way, you can see all mammalian skeletons as almost the same thing but just stretched and elongated in different ways.
The wings of a bat are like our own fingers, just stretched out, with an added membrane of skin to create the wing itself.
You could see how this might apply to goats.
You might look at the skeleton of a goat and say it is like a human’s, only hunched over on all fours.
This would mean that their forelegs are more like arms, just used in a different way.
Of course, you can argue this—but again, this is really just an issue of nomenclature.
No one would agree with you that goats have arms because that’s not a very useful distinction.
What about hands?
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Do goats have hands?
Hands, I think, is an even greater stretch of the imagination.
You could say this more accurately of something like a cat, for example, whose paws have grasping fingers and claws, and who can actually use their paws to manipulate things to a good degree.
But goats just have cloven hooves, with totally static extremities.
They can’t move their hooves individually to manipulate objects, and they don’t have elaborate bone structures in fingers like we do.
So, I don’t think any reasonable person would say goats have hands.
Feet, though, are a different matter.
Do goats have feet?
Yes, goats have feet, although this is not the term most would instinctively use.
They have hooves, cloven hooves at that, and that is more likely to be the word people choose to describe the end of a goat’s legs.
However, technically speaking, hooves are feet—or at least the back of the hoof is.
The cloven part is more like the goat’s toes.
Can goats stand on two legs?
No, not really—at least not for any length of time.
They are reasonably good climbers, so they often need to balance their weight on their back legs for a moment or two while they climb up somewhere higher.
However, their spines do not allow them to lean far back enough to hold an upright pose, and doing so would be at best very dangerous for them.
Goats can, briefly, support their weight on their back legs, but only as part of a forward motion.
So, make no mistake, the question is just as simple as it sounds.
Goats are four legged creatures, walking on all fours at all times, totally incapable of walking on two or of ever using their forelimbs to manipulate objects other than simply rolling them around.
We may disagree on the precise nomenclature for different parts of a goat’s body.
You might consider their hooves to be like little hands.
You might, by extension, think of their forelegs as little arms. By all, actual, strict, scientific definitions, though, they have four legs.
And that’s the end of it.