No kidding! Goats can understand human gestures?!

A new study finds goats can understand human gestures such as pointing…let us give you the rundown

The study carried out at Buttercups Sanctuary for Goats (Aww!) in Kent, involved researchers surreptitiously hiding food in one of two buckets…

They started off by placing two buckets in front of each goat and pointing to the one that contained food.

Once the goats understood the meaning behind the gesture, more complicated tasks were set, with three different pointing gestures – proximal pointing, crossed pointing and asymmetric pointing…

BTW

1. Proximal - researcher’s whole arm visibly pointing at the reward bucket

2. Crossed - only the researcher's hand and wrist are visible

3. Asymmetric - the researcher is standing in front of the bucket without food, whilst pointing towards the one containing the food

So, what were the results?

The goats were found to be better at identifying the bucket with the food when the researcher used the proximity and cross pointing hand gestures (1 and 2), compared with asymmetric pointing (3)

This means goats can generalise their interpretation of the human pointing gesture but might rely on other stimulus to learn more about their environment - who would have thought!

Credit to Alan G. McElligott at @RoehamptonUni, Zoe M. Martin at @QMUL, Christian Nawroth at Leibniz Institute for Farm Animal Biology & @ButtercupsGoats for this awesome study!

For the full paper, visit: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2020.00915/full