#GOATS INTERACTION #DR. ALAN MCELLIGOTT #CREATION SCIENCE #CATHOLIC SCIENCE #ANSWERS IN GENESIS #INSTITUTE FOR CREATION RESEARCH #FOCUS ON THE FAMILY #LIBERTY UNIVERSITY #CEDARVILLE UNIVERSITY #BOB JONES UNIVERSITY #HOME SCHOOL COOPS #ONE MILLION MOMS #CHRISTIAN #BIBLE #BOB JONES UNIVERSITY #WOMEN OF CHRIST #GOD VINE #LIVING CHRISTIAN #IT IS WRITTEN

Playful baby goat, commons

EMOTION  READING  GOATS?

Greetings all you wonderful people out there!

How has life treated you this past week? I pray very well and blessed by our Creator and Savior Jesus Christ! Many times over the past week the presence or our Lord has brought a smile to my face and peace to my heart. I am so blessed to be a Christian, I don’t know how anybody lives without Him.

Goat intelligence, commons

Speaking of smiling, I uncovered this fun fact of yet more animals giving evidence of the truth of the Bible. Goats! Goats are amazing creature no matter what, very intelligent and playful. But a new study found something stunning about these creatures…

Angry man, commons

University of London researcher Dr. Alan McElligott has recently conducted a study on goats to see if they can identify differences in human emotion. To avoid any criticism that live subjects could influence the goats by the animals sensing the emotions, McElligott only present images. He showed two different pictures, one of a human face smiling and the other of an angry human face. Each goat in the study avoided the image of the angry face while moving directly toward the smiling human image. Though not absolute proof, this study coupled with the well known fact that goats are capable of reading human body language,

presents “strong evidence that animals far removed from humans (speaking from an evolutionary perspective) are somehow capable of interacting in surprisingly complex ways with us.”¹

“This is a very strange phenomenon from a Darwinian point of view as goats only began to be domesticated roughly 11,000 (evolutionary) years ago. Given that the ability to interpret emotions depends on complex neurological functions, why would goats (who have no ability to make facial expressions themselves, and whose faces bear no resemblance to human faces) somehow have the ability to accurately read human expressions? It is very hard to imagine how this obscure ability could have any substantial selective

goats commons

advantage for domestic goats; it is even harder to explain if it developed prior to goats’ domestication, since then the goats would have had minimal contact with humans. Furthermore, how could such a complex trait have come about via random mutations in only 11,000 years? This does not seem to fit well with the evolutionary picture…The study has important implications for how we interact with livestock and other species, because the abilities of animals to perceive human emotions might be widespread and not just limited to pets.”²

However, looking at this study from a scriptural point of view

goat interaction with happy human
commons

we shouldn’t be surprised. The results fit nicely with what the Bible has recorded in Genesis and other places. “Since God created animals like goats right alongside humans from the very beginning, and for the purpose of interacting with humans, it would not be surprising that they would have the innate ability to understand, at least on some basic level, the meaning of human facial expressions.”³

Having had the privilege of working with goats, I fully concur that goats do have that ability. As a matter of fact, these animals constantly look at human faces to get their cues. God created these amazing and fun animals (Genesis 1:24), there is so much about them that just can’t be explained by

Goats look at people, commons

evolution.

Until next time, God bless and take care!

Willow Dressel

References:

^1-3https://creation.com/goats-read-faces?utm_campaign=infobytes_us&utm_content=Dragons+on+Noah%27s+Ark+in+16th+century+artwork&utm_medium=email&utm_source=mailing.creation.com&utm_term=Fortnightly+Digest+-+2018.09.28