The_Scientist_-_December_2018

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14 THE SCIENTIST | the-scientist.com


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NEWS AND ANALYSIS

ALAN MCELLIGOTT

See Me Happy


A


lan McElligott, an animal behavior
researcher at the University of Roe-
hampton in the UK, continues to be
impressed by goats. Since he started study-
ing the charismatic ungulates a decade ago,
he’s found that mothers remember the calls
of their kids several months after they’ve
been separated, and that goats can solve a
two-step puzzle box akin to those typically
used in primate research—and remember
how to do it a year later.
Now his team has found that goats at
the Buttercups Sanctuary in Kent,  UK,
can distinguish between happy and angry
human expressions. “Given some of the
other things that we’ve found out about
goats, I guess we shouldn’t really be that

surprised,” says McElligott, who’s hoping to
improve welfare guidelines for the animals
by revealing their smart and social nature.
McElligott’s experiment was simple.
Working with 20 goats at the sanctuary,
he and his colleagues presented each with
two black-and-white images—one of a
person smiling, and the other of the same
person making an angry expression—
then sat back and watched what the ani-
mal did. “If the goats ignored the photo-
graphs, for example, or walked up to the
photographs and ripped them off metal
panels and chewed on them, would I have
been shocked? Possibly not,” says McElli-
gott. “But... the goats did seem to take the
time to have a look at these photographs
and actually study them, believe it or not.”
And based on the time they spent inter-

acting with each image, the goats seemed
to prefer the happy snapshot (R Soc Open
Sci, 5:180491, 2018).
With the findings, goats join the ranks
of dogs and horses, two other species
known to show similarly subtle responses
to human facial expressions. Not only can
dogs distinguish between happy and angry
faces (Curr Biol, 25:P601–05, 2015), but
they can match the emotional tone of a
voice with the emotion being expressed
in an image of a human face (Biol Lett,
12:20150883, 2016). And a study in April
found that horses, first shown in 2016
to distinguish between happy and angry

DECEMBER 2018

GOAT’S-EYE VIEW: Like dogs, goats can discern
happy from angry human facial expressions—
and appear to prefer the former.
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