Goats can follow human instructions

[Catherine]

They have been doing tests with goats using food. When a person spoke in the direction of the food goats found it 60% of the time. Without human clues 
they only found it less than 50% of the time.

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2026...oice-study

Dogs can do this. Chimps cannot. So the issue is not intelligence alone. Is the ability linked to domestication?
That would be one reason why domestication benefits the animal that is domesticated.
It will be interesting to see what further studies show.

[Kalben]

That’s a really interesting point. I agree that domestication is probably part of the explanation, but I’d be careful about saying it proves that domestication caused the ability. Goats already showed an ability to use some human communicative cues in earlier studies, and this new experiment suggests they can also use the direction of a human voice to locate hidden food.

It would be especially interesting to test closely related wild species alongside domestic goats. If the domesticated animals consistently outperform their wild relatives, that would be much stronger evidence for domestication shaping this kind of human-directed communication.

[Catherine]

That is a good point. They will need to test more animals and compare the results.
It might be that animals that can follow directions are more likely to be domesticated.
I hope they do further tests.