Goats

DNA testing of bones suggests that nearly all modern domestic goats share an ancestor with the Bezoar Ibex, a wild mountain goat that still bounds across Turkey and northern Iran. Furthermore, the isotopes found in the bones hint that some herds kept during this period were grazing on wild diet while others were intentionally fed different plants—suggesting that humans were harvesting fodder or shepherding the goats to different areas.

Archaeologists exploring the 10,000-year-old human settlement Ganj Dareh in the mountains of Iran found that the abundant goat bones present were predominantly those of females. Herders throughout history have generally preferred female animals for reproduction and milk production, and with no such collections traced to earlier points in time, the discovery suggests that goats from this era may have been the first animals kept in large herds.

Goats figure prominently in ancient myth and religion. Most famously, the Greek god Pan, with goat’s horns and hind quarters, represented wilderness and fertility. Budi, the goat of the African Kuba people’s creation myth, created all horned animals. The eighth animal of the Chinese zodiac is a goat. And ancient Israelites loaded their sins onto the head of the goat-god Azazel to be borne and carried away by him—giving us the term “scape goat.”

Domesticated goats likely arrived in North America first with Spanish explorers in the American Southwest and later with English settlers in New England. Kept primarily for milk, they were easier to keep and transport than cows and capable of reproducing 3 or 4 times a year. While indigenous people did hunt and collect fibers from North American mountain goats (Oreamnos americanus), no evidence exists that these animals were ever herded or kept.

First published in a collection of Norwegian fairy tales, the story tells of three goats who, needing to cross a bridge to find new feeding grounds, must outwit the troll who lives underneath (and eats all who cross his bridge). Such “trolling” resonates into the age of social media. Like other animal fables (The Wolf and the Lamb, The Three Little Pigs), the tale ascribes rational capacity to farm animals and reinforces their role as food.

A 1900 USDA Census of farm animals estimated that the nation was home to 1.2 million dairy goats, an all-time peak and triple the current population. Prior to the explosive growth in commercial dairy cows, milk and cheese products were largely derived from backyard animals, and human consumption of goat milk was not markedly less common than that of cow’s milk. As of 2023, however, the nation’s dairy goat population stood at 400,000.

The second (1971) and third (1982) International Conferences on Goats led to the founding of the International Goat Association, the largest global alliance devoted to the use of science and technology in production of goat meat, milk, and fibers. The organization’s journal, Small Ruminant Research, describes a prominent IGA project aimed to improve goat “value chains” in developing economies by growing the scale of local goat-keeping operations.

Their reputation as omnivores is mostly accurate: goats can’t eat tin cans, but they will eat paper labels, poison oak, kudzu, and most other plant matter. Human use of goat herds to clear unwanted vegetation has resurged in the past decade. Google used goats to manicure its campus, government agencies have deployed them for weed control and fire prevention, and goat rental companies have been featured in national business publications.

Animal behaviorists have long known that certain domestic animals’ interactions with humans have shaped their communication behaviors. Using the ‘unsolvable problem’ experiment, scientists at London’s Queen Mary University presented individual goats with two containers—one with a food reward and one without. Notably, the goats would make prolonged eye contact with the humans—as will dogs, horses, and human toddlers—to discern a treat’s location.

From 1960 to 2017, the number of goats kept for milk stayed fairly constant in the Americas, Europe, and Oceania, while it more than tripled in Asia and Africa. With roughly one billion domestic goats on Earth, only about 22% are kept for milk production. Still, most are raised in much smaller-scale systems than those used for cattle and chickens, and the corresponding processes, products, and markets are thus less regulated and less understood.

Over 675,000 goats were slaughtered for meat in 2019 in the U.S.—nearly 20% more than three years earlier. U.S. figures are dwarfed by the rest of the world’s appetite for goat meat—at least seven nations slaughter 10 million goats or more each year, with over 100 million killed in China. Routinely in the U.S. at least 300,000 goats are kept for dairy production, a figure that has steadily grown along with consumer wariness of milk from factory-farmed cows.