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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
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 30 2018, @09:55PM (1 child)
This is laterality compounded with pack animal follow mentality where goats favor the right and a smiling human on the right confirms their choice while a smiling human on the left instinctively seems off.
This is also the source of left-hand traffic: While right-hand traffic is the default for humans (since we're generally right handed and default to right turns), horses are left-footed and will turn left at intersections if you forget to pull right. As such, even places with pavements were forced to LHT. Of course, in modern times humans do the driving so it's not an issue.
Btw, Wikipedia does a terrible job explaining all of this and makes some idiotic guesses about how Roman soldiers needed to keep their sword hand to the road or something... This is what happens when you light anglophiles write your history books.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 30 2018, @10:00PM
Sorry goats favor the left... So, "where goats favor the left and a smiling human on the right confirms their choice while a smiling human on the left instinctively seems off." since they want to avoid collisions... Most mammals are left-footed and would hold off walking when something is on the left like "waiting for traffic" while making a right turn only when there's a good reason to (like an idiot monkey smiling like it wants to feed / pet you).