Study reveals goats can read your emotions based on your voice

Goats can tell if you’re happy or angry based on your voice alone, study finds Their tendency to eat just about anything they can find may have given them a dim reputation. But goats may be smarter than we give them credit, a new study suggests. Researchers have found that the domesticated animals can tell if humans are happy or sad just by listening to our tone of voice. Goats have developed a sensitivity to our vocal cues over their long association with humans, going back 10,000 years, the scientists think. As well as audio cues, goats understand physical gestures and can even tell the difference between a smile and a scowl. This study offers the first evidence that goats can discriminate between cues expressed in the human voice, namely, emotional valence,’ said author Professor Alan McElligott at City University of Hong Kong (CityUHK). ’These findings contribute to the limited literature available indicating livestock, like companion animals, are sensitive to human emotional cues.’ It’s already known that goats can tell emotional differences in another goat’s calls, so the experts wanted to investigate if this ability extended to human speech. Their experiments took place at Buttercups Sanctuary For Goats, an animal rescue centre in in Boughton Monchelsea, Kent. Researchers used 27 goats, both male and female, all of which were used to human voices and human handling. Through a speaker in their enclosure, the goats were played human voices saying the words ’hey, look over here’ multiple times, either in a happy way or an angry way. Crucially, the goats were allowed to become accustomed to the sound of a happy voice for a while before the voice switched to angry, or vice versa. As suspected, most of the goats (18) looked towards the speaker when the voice switched. Also, most of these goats spent longer gazing towards the speaker when the tone of voice suddenly changed (compared to before the voice changed). Study author Dr Marianne Mason at the University of Roehampton told MailOnline: ’Of the goats that looked, they looked significantly longer after the change in playback emotion, suggesting these goats had noticed and responded to the difference in emotion conveyed.’ This suggests the animals were able to perceive a ’shift in emotional content’ in the human voices, the experts say in their paper, published in the journal Animal Behaviour. The team admit that not all the goats responded to the change in emotion, which may have been due to individual variations in their cognitive abilities. Also, the researchers didn’t notice any significant physiological changes among the goats, such as a raised heartbeat, following the voice changes. Despite this, researchers think goats know what the two types of voices actually mean – not just that one is different from the other. Much like dogs and cats, negative voices, like angry ones, may cause fear in goats, the researchers think. In contrast, positive voices may be perceived as calming and may even encourage animals to approach and help with human-animal bonding. This could be because goats have a long history of being domesticated by humans. According to Professor McElligott, goats were the first livestock species to be domesticated about 10,000 years ago. So they’ve likely evolved to develop ’a sensitivity to our cues over their long association with us’. ’Further research is needed to understand the importance of the human voice on the emotional lives and welfare of goats and other domesticated species,’ he said. Professor McElligott and colleagues have already shown that goats can read human emotional expressions by telling the difference between a positive face and a negative face. In the 2018 study, overall goats spent longer with photos of people grinning than photos of people scowling. Another study led by Professor McElligott found that goats can understand gestures like pointing, much like dogs, cats and horses can. This study had implications for how people interact with farm animals, because the abilities of animals to perceive human cues might be more widespread than oritinally thought, the authors said at the time.