Things That Are Neat: Goats
Image via Wikipedia
I love goats. They’re really cool animals. They’re always relatively friendly at petting zoos and folks’ll hire them to do gardening (mostly just by letting the goats eat stickerbushes). But my favorite thing about goats is their eyes.
If you’ve never looked at a goat’s eyes, try it sometime. They’re really, really cool. Their pupils are elongated, sort of like the licorice insides of a Good ‘n’ Plenty after you eat the sugar coating off. Actually, a lot of farm animals have similar pupils, like cows and horses, but, a goat’s irises are a lot lighter, so you can actually see it much more clearly.
Of course, in the dark, the pupil opens up and looks more circular, but in a normal, undialated state, it looks really interesting. About the only animal with strange pupils we see normally are cats, so it’s cool to go to a zoo or a farm and see another type of eye.
I also like that goats are animals that need other creatures around — which explains why they’ll typically come up to you at zoos (and it’s really fun to feed them when there’s goat food you can buy). Even when you don’t have food, though, a lot of times they’ll come over and check you out and be petted. Goats are one of my favorite animals — and goats are really neat.
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Another neat thing about goats is that they can climb trees! There are lots of wild ones in Auistralia, and this is one of their favourite techniques for reaching delicious foliage above ground in a harsh desert landscape.
Also, some goats were almost cold-blooded:
“Myotragus Balearicus, which lived on the Blearic Islands in the Mediterranean Sea until 3,000 years ago, had bones that resembled those of a reptile
Cold-blooded animals go through phases of slow growth that leave telltale rins in their bones. This slowdown allows them to live in ares where food is limited. Now Meike Kohler and Salvador Moya-Sola of the Autonomous University of Barcelona have spotted reptile-like rings in fossilised M. balearicus. This could explain how the species survived 5.2 million years in a barren landscape”
(From New Scientist, 21 Nov 2009)
I wish I knew BOTH of those things before when I wrote that! Those make goats even MORE awesome. Man, goats, keep on rocking!