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Can goats help each other? A new study by the Research Institute of Farm Animal Biology (FBN) in Dummerstorf in collaboration with colleagues from the University of Veterinary Medicine Vienna suggests that goats exhibit prosocial behavior—i.e. they are willing to help others without direct self-benefit. This could make an important contribution to understanding social cognition in farm animals.

In the study published in the journal , the researchers developed a novel experimental design—the so-called 'fake apple tree' apparatus, which is inspired by the natural climbing behavior of goats. In this experimental set-up, a goat can climb a platform to trigger a device, the branch of the tree, which moves a food dispenser downwards.

The results show that goats interacted significantly more often with the device when it contained food for their conspecifics. They also stayed longer in the position in which they only allowed their conspecific to access the food—without reaching for it themselves. Such behavior is also considered an indication of prosocial motivation in other animal species.

The results indicate that goats are quite capable of helping others, even if they themselves do not benefit directly. These results extend the previously limited field of species studied with regard to prosocial behavior and show that farm animals also display prosociality. Although not all goats showed uniform prosocial tendencies, the variation between individuals offers exciting starting points for further research.

"Our results suggest that prosocial tendencies also occur in farm animals such as goats when the experimental conditions are adapted to their natural behavior. By developing the 'fake apple tree' apparatus, we were able to show that such customized test designs could be crucial to reliably capture social motivations. This approach offers exciting prospects for investigating prosocial behavior in other animal species in the future," explains Dr. Jan Langbein from the Behavior and Animal Welfare working group at the FBN.

Goats live in so-called fission-fusion societies—dynamic social structures in which groups regularly dissolve and recombine. Such systems require a high degree of social adaptability and offer an ideal research field for questions of empathy, cooperation and social learning.

The current studies complement the previous research work of the Behavior and Animal Welfare working group. With its work, the team is contributing to researching aspects of learning and cognition in farm animals, using goats as a model animal and opening up new perspectives on livestock farming.