GoatMan

  1 Of course, an animal with long legs but a short neck could get around this by kneeling down to eat, but there is a phrase, “sitting duck,” and it doesn’t just apply to ducks.

  2 That is, random mutation, followed by natural selection.

  3 And overhunting by Yukaghirs has led to the decline of the elk populations in their area. Not that there’s many buffalo left in the USA, or bears in the UK, for that matter.

  Mind

  Buttercups Sanctuary for Goats

  (a bright new day)

  I need to get back to reality and approach the problem of goat perception from solid scientific bedrock. And who better to ask about the mental life of goats than Britain’s foremost goat behaviour expert, Dr. Alan McElligott?1

  He and his PhD students study the goats at Buttercups, the United Kingdom’s (if not the world’s) only sanctuary for abused goats, which happens to be located just down the road from where I live.

  Visiting Buttercups is so exciting. There are goats everywhere! Wandering around the yard, butting heads, eating, clanging their horns against the metal feeding troughs just for the sheer joy of it, standing on things, sitting on things, chewing on things, pooing on things…doing all the things goats like to do. Buttercups Sanctuary for Goats is heaven on Earth for goatkind, or at least a luxury spa resort. If you’re a goat at Buttercups, upon waking in your own warm and comfortable stall (which you can have all to yourself or enjoy with a close companion or two), you will be presented with a breakfast specially prepared to your individual tastes and requirements. After breakfast, the day is your own, and you’re free to amble about the yard enjoying the attention of the staff (grooming, pedicures, and the best medical care money can buy) or to laze on the various structures provided for your enrichment. Or, if you’re a more active and competitive spirit, why not see if you can climb the highest and become king (or queen) atop The Mound? And, of course, there’s always roaming in the fields of fresh green grass, dappled with the flowers that give your home its name, buttercups. When I’m a goat, I want to go to Buttercups before I die.

  Chatting with Bob and the goats at Buttercups.

  A happy goat?

  I meet Bob, the founder of Buttercups (“I started with two goats; now I’ve got two hundred fifty”), who regales me with tales of goats and introduces me to his general manager, Gower, and some of the volunteers who look after these animals. It seems a good place, and, as Gower confides later (after we witness some eccentric human behaviour from a couple of the volunteers), “It’s a sanctuary for humans, too.”

  Dr. Alan McElligott: goat expert.

  My meeting with Dr. McElligott takes place back in his office at Queen Mary University. On the wall he has a framed edition of the prestigious journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B with an image of one of his very own test subjects on the front.

  “Yeah, we got the cover,” he says all casually in his Irish accent. This is a man with impeccable goat credentials.

  I want to find out about goat behaviour for obvious reasons. The reasons are not obvious to Dr. McElligott, however. We begin at the beginning.

  “Why do you want to be a goat?” he asks.

  “Well, I went to see a shaman, and she told me to be a goat.”

  “Oh, right. I see,” says Dr. McElligott. After a pause, he continues: “Why did you go to see a shaman?”

  “Well, I just got pretty glum about trying to become an elephant.”

  “Right, of course,” says Dr. McElligott. Is that a resigned glance at the clock on the wall as I settle down at his desk?

  “Dare I ask: Why did you want to become an elephant?”

  “Ah, yes…Well, I think I was just feeling the weight of the world as a human and thought: Wouldn’t it be better to be an animal for a while? So I wouldn’t have to worry about, you know, human worries.”

  “Riiight.”

  “So I was wondering: Do goats worry?”

  “Yes.”

  Shit.

  Thankfully, Dr. McElligott has more to say on the subject: “Actually, I wouldn’t call it worry. They get anxious—stressed, perhaps. We know this from an experiment we did with the goats at Buttercups to try to identify emotions, where we put heart monitors on them, equipment to record vocalisations, tail posture, ear posture, and so on. And then we put the goats in a ‘negative state.’”

  Dr. McElligott is then very careful to emphasise that they “always work ethically” and “the goats are never in any danger, as that wouldn’t be ethical.” And if they do put the animals under stress, anything they do, they do “for less than five minutes,” and so on. His assurances have the opposite effect on me, and I’m sort of braced for some kind of Clockwork Orange–type experiment, but with goats.

  Dr. McElligott goes on: “The experiment we do is what’s called a ‘food frustration’ experiment. Basically, we feed a goat in one pen while letting a goat in the adjacent pen watch. So the goat that isn’t getting the food is put in a negative state. But without it being extremely stressful. As that wouldn’t be ethical.”

  Dr. McElligott and the ethics committee have considered the ethics of making a goat slightly jealous and concluded that in the name of science, it would not be unethical. As long as the goat is jealous for less than five minutes.

  “When you listen to goats, it all sounds quite monotonous. But there are in fact subtle changes in their bleats and slight shifts in ear and tail posture, depending on whether they’re in a neutral, negative, or even slightly positive state.”

  So…goats are capable of getting a bit stressed and sound a bit different when they do. I don’t want to seem ungrateful to Dr. McElligott and his colleagues, but this is hardly the profound sort of insight into goat minds I was hoping for. But as we talk, I start to understand where Dr. McElligott is coming from. As an ethologist, he’s interested in saying things about animal minds with a degree of certainty (and a quantified degree of certainty, at that). This is an extremely hard thing to do. It’s hard enough working out what’s going on in another person’s mind given all the benefits of being a person yourself, and even with words, we get it wrong. With animals, not only can you not ask what they’re thinking, you can’t really even draw on your own experience. Because how do you know what it’s like to be an animal? Therein lies the difficulty of the ethologist: if you want to say for sure what an animal thinks, well, you have to get the animal to somehow demonstrate what it’s thinking.

  As an analogy, I can imagine a scientist from a species of strange aliens with different ways of perceiving the world and communicating. The scientist, starting from the reasonable assumption that I wouldn’t like being hit on the head, experimentally hits me on the head and notes the changing tone of the sounds I make, my narrowing eyes, and the scrunching up of my forehead and concludes that’s how Homo sapiens sapiens react when put in a negative state. (“Hey, Zarg, turns out they don’t like your tickle probe.”)

  When we watch a video of some cute baby goats springing about all over the place in sheer joy because they’ve just been let out of their shed for the spring, I say, “Ahhhh, those goats are so happy!” Dr. McElligott cautions me to be more cautious. “You can be anthropomorphic and say they’re happy. But we need to study that scientifically to be able to identify it, not just assume. So what I’d say is this is an indication that they really vocalise a lot when they’re in an excited state.” In fact, throughout the conversation, he refuses to use phrases that anthropomorphise the goats in any way.

  Dr. McElligott and Annette are polar opposites in their approach to the inner life of animals. Annette starts by endowing animals with all the aspects of personhood, whereas Dr. McElligott works from the assumption that they have none. However, I suspect that their underlying goals aren’t too dissimilar in terms of reassessing the contemporary human-nonhuman animal contract, because much of Dr. McElligott’s work is relevant to improving the welfare of the billions of nonhuman animals farmed as livestock.

  He tells me abou
t an experiment they did at Buttercups to investigate whether goats that arrived at the sanctuary from abusive homes exhibited a “negative cognitive bias”: that is, were they in a glass-half-empty frame of mind? Presented with an ambiguous stimulus, like a little corridor of a kind that they’d previously been trained to expect to have a tasty goat treat at the end only half the time, would they choose to walk down the corridor and have a look (glass half-full) or avoid it (glass half-empty)? By walking down the corridor or not, the goats thus revealed their mood to the ethologist peeking at them with clipboard in hand.

  Buttercups is a sanctuary both in name and by nature. Many of the goats there have been rescued from more or less horribly unfortunate circumstances. When we arrived at the sanctuary, Bob told us some genuine horror stories. One goat, named Lucky, had been found in a pond by a member of the public. Its throat had been slit and tail cut off, and it had been left to drown. Amazingly, it survived and was brought to Buttercups: hence, Lucky. They thought another goat had black hair when it was brought in, but it turned out it was covered in diesel. It is called Diesel. Tales of humans abusing goats abound at Buttercups (there’s Curry and Bobbin, too). Dr. McElligott’s results showed that after at least two years of good care at Buttercups, goats rescued from abusive homes didn’t exhibit a negative cognitive bias compared to those that hadn’t been abused. In fact, female goats rescued from abusive homes were even slightly more positive than their nonabused counterparts, possibly suggesting long-term optimism after escaping their abusers.

  In human equivalents of Dr. McElligott’s ambiguous-corridor experiment, some people exhibit a negative cognitive bias. This strongly correlates with their suffering from “low mood” and (if persistent) clinical depression (as gauged from their questionnaire answers).2 If goats outwardly show a negative cognitive bias, can we infer that inwardly they’re feeling low or even depressed? It would seem pretty churlish to deny goats emotions if equivalent behaviour in humans is accepted as indicating they’re feeling sad.

  The cognitive bias experiment is in one form or another a commonly used way of getting around the fact that animals can’t tell you how they’re feeling (no surveys for goats along the lines of “In the past month, how often have you avoided social situations?”). Experiments have been done with sheep, dogs, rats, starlings, and little chicks. And after they’ve been subjected to various forms of (I’m sure ethically considered) stressful situations, all have shown a negative cognitive bias, so we can attribute internal emotional states to them, too. Animals other than ourselves show negative cognitive biases and therefore can feel sad. Not hugely surprising when we’re talking about goats or dogs or rats, but what about bees? Can a bee be depressed or at least have negative emotions? Because bees show cognitive biases, too. I asked one of the scientists who conducted the research on bees’ biases, Dr. Geraldine Wright of Newcastle University, what she thinks of this. Her reply was that it is “logically inconsistent to attribute emotions to goats and other animals on the basis of cognitive bias experiments and not bees.” So maybe there are some bees sadly buzzing around out there—or maybe demonstrating a negative cognitive bias isn’t in fact analogous to saying “I’m feeling sad.”

  The fact that even the most basic of feelings are difficult to scientifically pin down in animals illustrates just how hard it is to say anything definite about what’s going on in their minds. It’s one reason why ethologists like Dr. McElligott are so cautious in what they say about the inner lives of animals.

  Dr. McElligott returns to the subject of worrying goats.

  “OK, then, while goats don’t worry, they will certainly have concerns, and these concerns will be based on how they’ve evolved. In the wild, an animal like a goat is a prey animal. They have to eat and go to the water hole to drink and so on, but they have to balance these needs with the risks inherent in trying to satisfy them. So at the same time as eating or whatever, they’re being vigilant for predators, always being slightly on edge.”

  So my concerns as a wild goat would be how to eat food and how to avoid becoming food. I’ve never been a prey animal. Constantly being on edge because of the risk of suddenly being pounced on and eaten alive does sound a bit stressful, but hey, I live in gentrified urban Bankside, where I could get run over by a bus or a millionaire businessman in his sports car at any turn. Every animal has to live with the risk of sudden death, but only humans suffer from being able to consciously worry about it, especially with regard to all our lovers, friends, and family. However, being herd animals, goats do have social concerns as well.

  Dr. McElligott goes on to describe the social lives of goats. In the wild they generally hang out in sex-segregated groups, and each group has a well-defined linear hierarchy. The dominant male or female goat gets to sleep in the best places, gets to eat whichever food it wants, and generally guides the movements of its herd. The pecking order (a term taken from the strictly hierarchical bullying in flocks of chickens) continues down through the herd. So if I, as a lowly goat, find a particularly good patch of fresh green grass or a nice, warm, dry spot to bed down in and a goat higher in the social hierarchy comes over, I better move sharpish or I’ll be asking for trouble.

  The strong hierarchy is a way of avoiding having to fight over everything all the time, as everyone knows who’s their boss and knows their place. Of course, sometimes you want to test your place or, if you’ve just been introduced to the herd, you have to establish your place, and that results in some clashing of heads and manoeuvring to hold the high ground and establish dominance. But it’s not all butt, butt, butt; a goat has friends, too, forming allegiances and hanging out much more with some individuals than others.

  So as a goat, I’d have to survive in this social setting where dominance plays an important role: making friends and avoiding stepping out of line unless I want to cause a fracas.

  Keeping track of one’s place in the herd is cognitively taxing, especially because goats in the wild do what ethologists call “fission-fusion”: smaller splinter groups wander off from the main herd, spend some time together, and then rejoin everyone later. This means that the company a goat keeps is always changing, so not only does a goat have to remember who likes it, who it needs to avoid, who it can dominate, and who it has to submit to, it also has to make adjustments to its behaviour depending on who it’s hanging out with at any particular time. For example, I might find myself the highest-ranking member of the goats I’m with and need to have the nuance to realise that now it’s me who’s boss. And if I’m not the dominant goat amongst my current set of companions, I’d have to work out strategies to have some success with food and the ladies, like noticing when my superiors’ attention is elsewhere.

  It’s thought that the demands of living in these complex social environments is one reason why goats, humans, dogs, and many other social creatures evolved our sophisticated cognitive skills. How intelligent are goats, then?

  Bob at Buttercups has some great tales of goat cleverness. Thirty-two of his goats are survivors of a series of experiments the Royal Navy conducted to find out how a human would fare when escaping from a submarine at different depths. This involved putting the goats into a hyperbaric chamber and seeing if they got the bends at different pressures (they used goats because their respiratory physiology happens to be a close analogue to ours). Bob says that the Navy’s goat handlers told him that after a while they realised that some of the goats seemed to develop a limp when being led to the pressure chamber (they had to be healthy at the start of the test or they couldn’t be experimented on), but on being returned to their pen, the limp would miraculously clear up.

  I am somewhat incredulous when I hear this anecdote: “Really? They faked a limp to get out of being experimented on?” Sure, Bob. Goats understand experimental method. Goats can fake a limp. Yes, you really do love these goats, don’t you, Bob?

  Just to make sure I am not being too unfair to Bob, I do a Google. Bob’s story immediately seems more credible in light
of the fact that the world, it seems, is full of both wild and domestic animals faking it. There’s even a funny video of Mr. Snuggles, a cat, faking a limp so he’s allowed inside the house. Bob also tells me that they’ve had to fit extra locks on all the pens because a couple of the goats have learned how to slide the bolts and let themselves out. He’d been trying to get his goats to bed in their pens one night, when he realised he’d put a few of them to bed twice. It turns out, not only were they letting themselves out so they could carry on romping around, but they’d gone around to the pens of their friends and unlocked them, too.