The love affair that humans have with the dogs seems so old that the scientists don't even know when it began. However, the scientists were surprised to learn that the goats go as far back as 11,000 years, when it comes to domestication.
As per recent research published in Biology Letters, thanks to more than 11,000 years of being petted by humans, they are now hardwired into looking up to humans for help, just like dogs. "Goats gaze at humans in the same way as dogs do when asking for a treat that is out of reach," first author Christian Nawroth said in a statement.
Researchers also pointed out that domestication has its own side-effects that we don't completely understand. In one such study regarding dogs using their gaze to ask for human help, researchers discovered that "tame" wolves, the one domesticated by humans, do not look up to human bystanders in their hour of need. The study findings pointed out that these inter-species transaction is something that is developed gradually, over many generations.
While goats have had that kind of time to develop such a behavior, researchers were still amazed to notice that they looked up to their human handlers when they wanted help.
"The key difference is that these goats have not been bred as companion animals or pets,"
According to Alan McElligott, lead author from Queen Mary University of London, "The other animals studied, those were domesticated to work fairly closely with humans, as guard dogs or companion dogs or, in the case of horses, to be ridden. So we thought goats would be a very useful model to compare them to, because they were domesticated for milk, meat and hair instead."
Simply put, these goats continued to maintain the gaze behavior even when they were being domesticated for the purpose of meat consumption and not as pets.
While McElligott wants to replicate these results in similar kind of domesticated animals, such as sheep or cows. However, it may not be possible to get the right experimental conditions. The goats that were part of the study were petted by humans, which is a crucial aspect of the experiment. He explained that if the scientists took a random gang of goats, who have never interacted with humans and try to experiment with them, the scientists would not be able to determine if the animals who resisted the gaze trend did it because they were afraid of humans.
