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takyon [soylentnews.org] writes:

Goats 'drawn to happy human faces' [bbc.com]

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.

Also at NPR [npr.org].

Goats prefer positive human emotional facial expressions [royalsocietypublishing.org] (open, DOI: 10.1098/rsos.180491) (DX [doi.org])

Related: Cross-Modal Recognition in Goats [soylentnews.org]
Sheep Can Recognize Human Faces [soylentnews.org]
Goats: Man's Other Best Friend [soylentnews.org]

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