Clever goats

12juni2014
Source: levendehave.nl
Goats are intelligent. They can complete complex tasks and remember them for quite a long time, as demonstrated by the research of an English-Swiss scientist. She looked at the time needed to teach a task, and if the goats still knew it after an extended period.
The complex task consisted of a number of actions the goats had to complete in order to get a reward. For example, the goats had to pull a handle and then lift it in order to get to the treat. Nine of the twelve goats learned how it worked after practicing 8 to 22 times, memorising the trick in less than two minutes. A month after this first trial, the test was repeated, and then again ten months later. The speed at which the goats learned the task at each of these trials is a measure of long-term memory, and repeated trials demonstrated that their long-term memory was excellent. The study was published in Frontiers of Zoology.