Goats Prefer Happy People
Smiling costs nothing, even more so if we discover that animals are able to read our smiles and understand our happiness. This is the discovery of a recent scientific study that concluded that goats prefer happy people.
Would you like to know more? Let’s find out in this article why goats prefer happy people.
How did it turn out that goats prefer happy people?
Goats prefer happy people – what a find!
Those responsible for this discovery belong to the Queen Mary University of London, while the results of their research can be read in the journal Royal Society Open Science.
To reach their conclusions, the research team used a simple but effective device: a wall with two images, separated from each other by a space of about 1.5 meters.
The pictures on the wall depicted the same person, on one side with a distressed expression, on the other smiling.
The purpose of the experiment was to investigate the reaction of the goats placed in front of the two images, giving them a maximum time of 30 seconds to react. The operation involved 20 different goats.
The surprising conclusion
By observing the reaction of each goat, the researchers found that the majority preferred to interact with the image of the smiling person.
This behavior has led researchers to think that goats can distinguish our facial expressions. But this is not the only curious information that the experiment unearthed.
The interaction with the photo depicting a happy expression was greatest when it was on the right side of the wall. For the researchers, this finding suggests that goats use the left hemisphere of their brains when they have to process positive emotions.
An observation that can also be found in other studies that relate happiness and positive emotions to the activity of the left hemisphere. Before this experiment, we knew that goats can “read” the body language of us humans, but only now do we discover that they can even understand our facial expressions.
Are there other animals capable of reading our smile?
It is evident that domestication has shaped the behavior of some animals, making it easier for them to adapt to the human environment.
For this reason pets more accustomed to the relationship with us, such as horses and dogs, are able to decipher our facial expressions.
The experiment described in this article, on the other hand, explained how even domesticated animals dedicated to production, such as goats, are able to do the same thing. We now know that goats prefer happy people.
