Goat

• 1. Introduction

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  The goat was one of the first animals humans ever domesticated. The earliest remnants of domesticated goats, dating back 10,000 years, were found at Ganj Dareh in Iran. By 2022 their descendants numbered more than 1.1 billion, scattered across nearly every corner of the world. An animal that began as the wild bezoar ibex of the Zagros Mountains had become livestock, companion, and symbol all at once. So how did a curious tree-climbing ruminant come to pull the chariot of a thunder god, carry the sins of a community into the wilderness, and clear brush from California hillsides? This is the story of an animal whose usefulness and strangeness run in equal measure.

• 2. From Ibex To Herd

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  Genetic analysis points to the wild bezoar ibex as the likely ancestor of all or most domestic goats alive today. Once widespread across Anatolia, the species now survives in the Zagros Mountains, and it carries the lineage of the domestic goat in its DNA. Neolithic farmers began herding wild goats for their easy milk and meat, but the animal gave far more than that. Goat dung was burned as fuel, and bones, hair, and sinew were turned into clothing, building material, and tools. Goat remains turn up at archaeological sites across Western Asia, including Jericho, Choga Mami, Djeitun, and Çayönü. These finds place the domestication of goats in the region somewhere between 8,000 and 9,000 years ago, and DNA evidence pushes the date to around 10,000 years. Goat hide carried its own quiet history too. It was used to make water and wine bottles for travel and for transporting wine to sale, and it was worked into parchment that could hold human writing.

• 3. Bodies Built To Climb

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  Horns made of living bone, wrapped in keratin and other proteins, sit on the heads of most goats. They serve for defense, dominance, territoriality, and even thermoregulation. While two horns is the norm, polycerate goats have appeared with as many as eight, a genetic rarity. Goats have resisted the breeding that gave cattle reliable hornlessness, because the genes for sex and the genes for horns sit closely linked. Cross two genetically polled goats and the offspring include many intersex individuals, typically sterile. Their eyes set them apart as much as their horns. Goats have horizontal, slit-shaped pupils that grant a wide field of vision on either side, useful for spotting predators while avoiding the dazzle of overhead sun. They have no tear ducts at all. As ruminants they carry a four-chambered stomach made up of the rumen, reticulum, omasum, and abomasum, and as even-toed ungulates they walk on cloven feet. A doe's udder usually holds two teats, unlike the four of cattle, though the Boer goat sometimes bears up to eight. Each goat carries two sets of 30 chromosomes, a diploid count that quietly governs the whole animal.

• 4. The Curious Escapist

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  Goats are the only ruminant to regularly climb trees, agile and balanced enough to perch in precarious places. That same curiosity makes them notorious for escaping their pens, testing every fence and enclosure for weakness. If any part of the fencing can be overcome, goats almost inevitably get out. Some studies rate them as intelligent as dogs. Handled as a group, goats herd far less than sheep do. Left to graze undisturbed, they spread across the field rather than feeding side by side, and nursing mothers leave their kids separated in a behavior called lying out rather than clumped together. Faced with an intruder, goats turn and face it, and bucks are more likely than rams to charge or butt at a human. A 2016 study found that goats try to communicate with people much as dogs and horses do. When a familiar challenge is suddenly modified, a goat will look to a human for help, a glance that says a great deal about ten thousand years of partnership.

• 5. Kidding And Milk

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  Gestation in goats lasts roughly 150 days, and twins are the usual result, though single and triplet births are common too. Less often a doe produces quadruplets, quintuplets, or even sextuplets. Just before kidding she develops a sunken area around the tail and hip, breathes heavily, and may grow restless and unusually affectionate toward her keeper. After birth the mother often eats the placenta, which supplies needed nutrients, helps stop her bleeding, and mirrors wild deer in reducing the birth scent that draws predators. Puberty arrives between three and 15 months depending on breed and nutrition, and many breeders wait until a doe reaches 70% of adult weight before breeding her. The buck announces his readiness with a strong odor built from sebaceous scent glands at the base of his horns, and some does refuse to mate with a buck whose glands have been removed. Milk follows kidding in a process called freshening. Dairy goats generally give between 1,500 and 4,000 lb of milk across a 305-day lactation, and a good doe yields at least 6 lb a day, with exceptional first-time milkers reaching 16 lb. Goats that are never bred but kept in milk can sometimes lactate past the usual 305 days, and male lactation occasionally occurs.

• 6. An Appetite For Everything

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  Goats are reputed to eat almost anything, a reputation rooted in how they feed. They are browsers rather than grazers like cattle and sheep, and their curiosity leads them to chew and taste anything resembling plant matter, including cardboard, clothing, and paper, just to judge whether it is worth eating. A newborn kid digests like a monogastric animal, its milk bypassing the undeveloped rumen through closure of the reticuloesophageal groove during suckling. As the kid takes solid feed, the rumen swells in size and in its power to absorb nutrients. Diet shapes the adult as much as breed does. Higher protein diets of 10 to 14% and ample calories before puberty produce faster growth and larger eventual size. Large-framed goats reach mature weight later, at 36 to 42 months, while small-framed goats arrive at 18 to 24 months, and the larger animals need more calories just to maintain daily function. Hardy as they are, goats still fall to disease, from pneumonia and foot rot to caprine arthritis encephalitis and foot-and-mouth, and they can pass tuberculosis, brucellosis, Q fever, and rabies to people. A goat may live 15 to 18 years, and one reportedly reached 24, though the stresses of kidding can cut a doe's span to 10 or 11 and the rut can drop a buck's to eight to 10.

• 7. Work Beyond The Farm

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  More than 1.1 billion goats lived in the world in 2022, and 150 million of them were in India, a single country holding a remarkable share of the global herd. India led milk production that year with 6.25 million metric tons, ahead of Bangladesh and South Sudan. The country also slaughters 41% of its 124.4 million goats each year, producing meat that makes up 8% of its annual meat output. Worldwide, roughly 440 million goats are slaughtered annually for meat. Goat meat itself tastes close to spring lamb, so much so that across the English-speaking Caribbean and South Asia the word mutton covers both goat and sheep. The wool trade prizes the soft hairs near a goat's skin. The cashmere goat yields one of the most expensive natural fibers produced, harvested once a year, while the Angora breed grows long curling locks of mohair that reach four inches or more and are shorn twice a year. Goats also work as eating machines. Since 1990, when herds were used to clear dry brush from California hillsides threatened by wildfire, conservation grazing has spread across North America, with companies like Rent A Goat removing blackberry vines, poison oak, and the kudzu that has been targeted in Chattanooga, Tennessee, and Spartanburg, South Carolina. Some militaries even use goats to train combat medics, and in the United States goats became the main species for this after the Pentagon phased out dogs in the 1980s.

• 8. Gods, Devils, And Scapegoats

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  Amalthea, in classical myth, was either a nymph who fed the infant Jupiter with goat's milk or the goat who suckled him. When the god broke one of the goat's horns, he gave it the power to fill itself with whatever its owner desired, and so was born the cornucopia, the horn of plenty. The goat's reach into human belief runs wide and strange. In Norse mythology, Thor's chariot is pulled by the goats Tanngrisnir and Tanngnjóstr, which he eats at night and revives each morning, provided every bone stays whole. When a farmer's son breaks a leg bone to suck the marrow, the goat's leg stays broken, and the boy must serve Thor in compensation. That tale shadows the Scandinavian Yule goat, or Julbocken, once a goat slaughtered around Yule and now a straw figure, swollen each year into the giant Gävle goat erected in the Swedish city of Gävle. In Finland the related Nuuttipukki of St. Knut's Day, January 13, were young men in inverted fur jackets, bark masks, and horns who went house to house demanding food and leftover alcohol. Eastward, Hinduism's Daksha is sometimes shown with a male goat's head, the result of Shiva beheading him and Vishnu restoring him with a goat's head in place of his own. The Bible names goats many times, with seven Hebrew and three Greek terms marking their importance in ancient Israel. On Yom Kippur, two goats were chosen by lot, one sacrificed and the other driven into the wilderness to carry the community's sins, the origin of the word scapegoat. The same animal that fed an infant god also became a face of the devil, depicted as Baphomet, whose goat head appears in the inverted pentagram that originated with the Church of Satan.