You'd never mistake a goat for a dog, but on an unreasonably warm afternoon, I almost do. I'm on a farm in northern Germany, trying to keep my head due to work stress. Sixty Nigeria goats are taking turns crashing their horns(角) against wooden fences. Then, during the chaos, something remarkable happens. One of the animals raises her head and stares thoughtfully at me, her widely spaced eyes and odd pupils seeking to make contact—and perhaps even connection.
It's a look we see in other humans, in our pets and in our primate(灵长类) relatives, but not in animals raised for food. Or maybe we just haven't been looking hard enough.
That's a cool idea here at Research Institute for Farm Animal Biology (FBN), one of the world's leading centers for exploring the minds of goats, pigs and other livestock. Scientists here are exploring the men tal and emotional lives of animals we've lived with for thousands of years, yet, from a cognitive(认知的) perspective, know almost nothing about.
The work is part of an effort to overturn the idea that livestock are dumb and unworthy of scientific attention. Over the past decade, researchers at FBN and elsewhere have shown that pigs show signs of empathy and that goats match dogs in some tests of social intelligence. What shocks some experts is that cows can be potty(便盆) trained, suggesting a self-awareness behind the blank stares and chewing.
"There's a lot to be learned by studying the mental lives of these creatures,"says Christopher, a Johns Hopkins university psychologist. Disregarding livestock, he says, has been a"missed opportunity"by the scientific community. The field faces challenges, however. Farm animals can be huge, many are hard to train, and traditional funders and standard journals have generally rejected such studies. But as scientists push past these obstacles, they are getting insights not only into minds of livestock, but into the evolution of our own cognition. What they learn could even change the way we house and treat these creatures.
