A goat with a treat in mind is not easily distracted, but can it follow something it cannot even see? Scientists wanted to know whether a goat could use a human voice coming from behind a screen to work out where food is hidden. This ability has been demonstrated in human babies and dogs, but not in chimpanzees, who are our closest living relatives. To test whether goats could do this, a team from the University of Zurich placed some pasta in one of the two buckets and spoke to 29 goats kept in a sanctuary in the UK. The goats managed to locate the food about 60% of the time when their utterances directed them towards it.



A hidden researcher, two buckets and a screen




The study, Domestic goats can follow the direction of human voices to solve a hidden-object task, led by Stuart Watson, was published in in 2026. The earlier preprint on bioRxiv offers more detail on how carefully the test was designed. According to the preprint, 36 adult goats were initially tested at Buttercups Sanctuary in September 2016. Seven were excluded, leaving 29 goats, nine females and 20 males, that completed all three conditions. Each goat completed four trials per condition, twelve in total, with the baited bucket’s location counterbalanced between trials. Under the key condition, the hidden researcher sat less than 30 cm from the empty bucket but faced the baited one and spoke excitedly towards it in German: “Ja guck mal, ja guck mal da, das ist ja fein!” (“Oh, look, look there, this is great!”).



Three conditions to separate voice from smell




In the main condition, the researcher sat close to the empty bucket but spoke excitedly towards the baited one. So if a goat simply headed for the nearest sound, it would choose the wrong bucket. Silence was the first control condition and was used to test if the goats could smell the food. In the second control, the researcher spoke excitedly while facing away from both buckets, so there was sound but no useful directional information. Four trials were done in each condition.



Goats chose the food 60% of the time




When the voice indicated the direction of the pasta, goats chose the baited bucket 60% of the time. In the silent condition, they chose it about 47% of the time and 49% in the speech-away condition, figures consistent with chance. The authors suggest that some goats can use the direction of human speech to locate the food. Goats have not been trained for this purpose.



How the result compares with other species




The study replicates an experiment previously run with human infants, chimpanzees and dogs, which makes the results easy to compare. The goats’ performance resembled that of dogs, whereas chimpanzees generally fail the task. One detail worth noting is that, according to The Independent, the researcher used a German sentence because it was their native language.



An earlier test of pointing at the same sanctuary




The goats were already known to follow other human cues. In the study, Goats Follow Human Pointing Gestures in an Object Choice Task, published in in 2020, Christian Nawroth, Zoe Martin and Alan McElligott studied 20 goats at Buttercups, of which nine went on to the main pointing tests. In one experiment, food was hidden in one of two buckets by the experimenter while the goats needed to use a proximal pointing gesture to pass the pre-test.



The paper reports that only 9 of the 20 goats passed the six-trial pre-test and advanced to the main experiment. Those individuals were then given three cue conditions. They were proximal, crossed and asymmetric pointing, with distance ranging from about 30cm to 90cm, allowing the authors to test whether goats would generalize from the easiest cue to more ambiguous gestures. According to the authors, the research contributes to a better understanding of human-animal relationships and farm animal social cognition. The second study involves a different stimulus: voice direction.



What the researchers say it means




The authors write that the exact roles of domestication and experience with humans in this ability remain unclear. For context, the preprint notes that only one of 16 domesticated piglets in an earlier study could find a reward using voice direction alone, which is why the team wants to test more domesticated and wild species. Watson told The Guardian that the findings may shed light on the cognitive changes that helped species become more compatible with human living, which could matter for animal welfare.