Goat Emotions, Cognition, and Personality

Positive welfare is a relatively modern concept based on the idea that on the whole, an animal’s positive experiences should outweigh their negative ones. Intuitively, we therefore require indicators to measure when animals are experiencing positive and negative emotional states, as well as providing opportunities for animals to create positive experiences. Goats typically live rich social and emotional lives, are naturally inquisitive, and seek cognitive challenges, highlighting the importance of a complex and cognitively stimulating environment for their welfare. However, how goats respond to their environment is not the same for each individual, underlining the shortcomings of a ‘one size fits all’ approach to enhancing welfare. In sum, to achieve positive welfare in goats, we must possess a means to monitor their emotional experiences, understand their cognitive abilities and provide sufficient opportunities to apply these, while ensuring welfare measures are tailored at an individual level. This chapter will therefore focus on potential behavioural, physiological, and cognitive indicators used to measure goat emotional states in the short and long term; their cognitive abilities in the physical and social domains; and the effect of personality on how goats interact with their social environment and on cognitive abilities. It contains enriching material in the form of videos and goat call recordings to complement your reading experience.