![]() ![]() The bigger from both baby goats clumsily get up and look for the much needed life-giving milk. And there, In the corner under the hay, two newborn baby goats and their proud mother goat look at me.įor a moment I just stand there spellbound. The sound goes from the back part of stable. The brownies are still lying down and only Rika is quietly greeting me with a growl. There is a similar atmosphere in the stable. This atmosphere is enhanced by the omnipresent peace and silence. The snow-covered farm reminds me more of a phantom from fairy tales than a real building at this time. It is still dark, as the darkness is slowly receding, but the sun has not yet risen. ![]() Images: goat kid Keven Law Australian sea lion Berichard cotton-top tamarin Ltshears African elephant nickandmel2006 (all from Wikimedia Commons).“It’s early in the morning. Biological sciences / The Royal Society PMID: 22719031 Mother goats do not forget their kids' calls. And there's a less cute reason to remember which animals are your offspring: Inbreeding avoidance, which is biologists' way of saying "not mating with your relatives." Kids sure do grow up fast.īriefer EF, Padilla de la Torre M, & McElligott AG (2012). Goats are social animals, for one thing, so keeping track of each other is important. (It would be nice to see the experiment repeated with new recordings of the adult offspring, though, so we'd be sure that the moms can still recognize their grown kids once they have more mature voices.)Īssuming mother goats can recognize their kids throughout life, there are some advantages. They may be able to recognize their offspring for many years afterward. If the mothers still reacted strongly to the recordings made when their kids were five weeks old, the authors reason, they've probably stored memories of their kids' voices throughout childhood. The goats had distinct voices, and their moms recognized them even when after they'd grown up and moved out. Acoustic analysis of the recordings showed that the moms weren't just mistaking the voices of their older kids for the similar sound of their younger kids. ![]() They reacted more strongly to the sounds of their own offspring than to the sounds of the neighborhood kids. Would the moms be able to pick out the voices of their now-adult children from the other familiar bleating? But this time they were mixed in with recordings from other, unrelated goat kids that currently shared their pen. The scientists played the old recordings of their kids to the mother goats. Meanwhile, another year's batch of babies had been born, and the mothers were busy nursing their new kids. Mother and kid were living in separate pens where they couldn't see or hear each other. By now, the goat kids they'd recorded had been weaned from their mothers for at least seven months. More than a year later, the researchers brought their speakers back to the farm. The mother goats' reactions-how much they bleated, how quickly they looked toward the source of the sound-were measured as a baseline. ![]() Then they played back those recordings to the mothers while the kids were away from them. The scientists recorded baby goats' bleating when they were five weeks old. So researchers in the UK, led by Elodie Briefer at Queen Mary University of London, went to a Nottinghamshire farm to study vocal recognition among a small group of goat mothers. Domestic goats are good subjects for this area of research: they're chatty, they're easy to find from one year to the next (since they live in pens), and they form close relationships between mother and kid. ![]()
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