New research suggests that like dogs, goats also seek to develop social relationships with us. So perhaps we should stop eating them ...

Do goats secretly love us? They’ve been keeping awfully quiet about it, but fresh data from Queen Mary University Of London suggests that goats are on a similar domestication trajectory to dogs.

A study published in the journal Biology Letters gave goats a task that involved taking the lid off a box to receive a reward. When they set the task difficulty to “impossible”’, the researchers’ goats gazed imploringly at nearby humans, in the same way that dogs do.

The implication appears to be that our previous explanation about co-evolution is slightly flawed. “Dogs evolved to follow our gaze because we needed them to be good hunting dogs,” explains Dr Jenna Kiddie, a senior lecturer in animal behaviour and welfare at Anglia Ruskin University. “We’ve never had any social need from goats apart from their meat and milk, so this research really throws that into the water.”

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A great deal of research has been done on dogs and wolves, explaining why one was domesticated and the other not, but for barnyard species the data is far more patchy. “We know a lot about cognition – crows, for example, being very intelligent. But in terms of the social aspects of the relationship between humans and animals, that’s still under explored.”

Sheep, she believes, are probably much less “human” than goats because they’re neophobic – afraid of everything – and cluster in packs, never truly gazing up. Whereas the goat’s natural desire to explore offers cross-species sociability. Goats were also the first species humans domesticated, about 10,000 years ago, giving them a head start.

“It’s exciting research,” Kiddie agrees. “It definitely makes me want to have a go myself. I think donkeys would be a good candidate. A horse will tell you when it’s upset, but donkeys are far more stoic than that.”

Are goats about to join dogs and dolphins on the too clever/too cute to eat list? “All animals should be afforded respect,” Kiddie says. “But I tend to think the implications will more be for how handlers interact with goats – things we now know goats do and don’t like.”

Whatever their IQ, sentimentalising humans into not eating them is surely the smartest bit of co-evolution any animal could perform.