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posted by martyb on Thursday August 30 2018, @08:21PM   Printer-friendly
from the get-on-the-right-side dept.

Goats 'drawn to happy human faces'

Scientists have found that goats are drawn to humans with happy facial expressions. The result suggests a wider range of animals can read people's moods than was previously thought.

The researchers showed goats pairs of photos of the same person, one of them featuring an angry expression, and the other a happy demeanour.

The goats made a beeline for the happy faces, the team reports in the journal Royal Society Open Science.

The result implies that the ability of animals to perceive human facial cues is not limited to those with a long history of working as human companions, such as dogs and horses.

Instead, it seems, animals domesticated for food production, such as goats, can also decipher human facial cues.

[...] But the effect was only significant when the happy-faced photo was placed on the right-hand side.

When the happy photos were placed on the left, the goats showed no significant preference either way.

The researchers think this is because the goats are using one side of their brain to process the information - something that's seen in other animals.

It could either be that the left side of the brain processes positive emotions, or that the right side of the brain is involved in avoidance of angry faces.

Also at NPR, c|net, Queen Mary University of London.

Goats prefer positive human emotional facial expressions (open, DOI: 10.1098/rsos.180491) (DX)

Related: Cross-Modal Recognition in Goats
Sheep Can Recognize Human Faces
Goats: Man's Other Best Friend


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 30 2018, @08:26PM (7 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 30 2018, @08:26PM (#728394)

    a fiery death? [soylentnews.org]

  • (Score: 2) by JNCF on Thursday August 30 2018, @09:48PM (6 children)

    by JNCF (4317) on Thursday August 30 2018, @09:48PM (#728440) Journal

    You city dwellers keep thinking goats are cute doggies, but we killed them for a damn good reason. They cause harm, both directly to humans and indirectly by killing our livestock.

    We even burned all the forest off of Mount Monadnock just to wipe out a goat herd. The mountain is still bald 2 centuries later.

    At this point, reintroducing the goat is like introducing an invasive species. One might as well release lions and tigers and hippos and tse-tse flies and bot flies and the guinea worm. Heck, go for smallpox too!

    People who support goats are a special kind of traitor. It's not really against a country. It's against humanity itself. We tamed the wilderness so we could live safely, and some people want to undo that.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 30 2018, @10:44PM (1 child)

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 30 2018, @10:44PM (#728467)

      Goats? I always considered them an extremely robust farm animal kept around for many reasons.

      One of which is NSFW, but can emulate critical infrastructure should rightsholders of the primary source withhold their services.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 31 2018, @04:55AM

        by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 31 2018, @04:55AM (#728618)

        Goats? I always considered them an extremely robust farm animal kept around for many reasons.

        One of which is NSFW, but can emulate critical infrastructure should rightsholders of the primary source withhold their services.

        Erdoğan? Is that you?

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 30 2018, @11:28PM (2 children)

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 30 2018, @11:28PM (#728487)

      I was scammed by a goat.

      • (Score: 2) by RamiK on Friday August 31 2018, @03:50AM (1 child)

        by RamiK (1813) on Friday August 31 2018, @03:50AM (#728600)

        Was it bipedal and standing on a crossroad? I know that fucker. Tried to sell me a guitar. But dangit I have my fiddle and I'm the best that ever been!

        --
        compiling...
        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 31 2018, @01:29PM

          by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 31 2018, @01:29PM (#728730)

          The goat was supposed to eat poison ivy and produce anti-poison ivy milk but it just ate all the bushes and didnt produce any milk.

    • (Score: 3, Informative) by HiThere on Friday August 31 2018, @02:03AM

      by HiThere (866) Subscriber Badge on Friday August 31 2018, @02:03AM (#728550) Journal

      You are slightly overreacting to ?, but it's true that goats are unreasonably destructive. They'll eat nearly anything, they kill off forests by eating the saplings, etc. But it's also true that properly controlled goats can be useful. They can live on land that no other farm animal can, and their milk is superior in certain ways. (I don't really like it, but this doesn't change the facts.)

      The key is "properly controlled", of course. And that can be difficult, as goat proof fences are tricky. But the guy who herds the goats that eat the poison oak in the local parks seems to manage it with portable fences. (I'm not sure whether to goats are eating the tree saplings, or whether they only do that when they're hungrier. ... I've got my doubts being that my mother had a goat that ate the plastic top off her car (flexible plastic covering over metal) and some fiberglass insulation she was planning to install. *She* didn't have it well controlled, but, OTOH, it was a single goat, not a herd.

      --
      Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.