3 ms·

Your claims about goats strike me as true, but I have an addition. In my experience with goats, their salient feature is a maniacal and skillfully-executed des

• GlenTheMachine 8y ago
  This is true, but goats do observe and learn from each other, and this is especially true in terms of causing trouble. If one goat figures out how to get out, everybody else follows. If one sheep gets out, she is very upset (generally) and does her best to get back in! Anthropomorphizing again, it looks like goats are more intelligent than sheep. But I'm not sure that's actually true; I think it's just that the same local minimum in the flock dynamics space that cause goats to fight each other for grain also causes them to be more inventive in their random walk through life. When you house sheep and goats together, the sheep learn to do some of the same things the goats do. If you want to introduce your sheep to a new food, give it to the goats first. They'll eat it, the sheep will see them eating it, and then the sheep will eat it. I've seen goats stand on their back legs to get to the lower branches of trees. The sheep had never thought to do that on their own. But once they see the goats doing it, they try it too. That tells me the sheep aren't inherently less intelligent; there's just less variation in their nominal behavior.
  • deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]