What are you thinking about, goat?At last, we finally know!
The question that has plagued humanity since the beginning of time has finally been answered...
Do goats prefer smiling or frowning human faces?!
Well, thanks to the research conducted by scientists at Queen Mary University of London we now have evidence of how goats process human emotional expressions.
Published in the journal Royal Society Open Science, the study describes how 20 goats interacted with different human facial expressions.
Dr Alan McElligott, who led the study, said it 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".
The study was done by showing goats unfamiliar grey-scale faces of the same person - one smiling and one frowning.
According to the team, the happy faces got greater interactions from the goats, who were more eager to approach and explore the images with their snouts.
The paper's first author, Dr Christian Nawroth, said: "We already knew that goats are very attuned to human body language, but we did not know how they react to different human emotional expressions, such as anger and happiness.
"Here, we show for the first time that goats do not only distinguish between these expressions, but they also prefer to interact with happy ones."
Thank goodness we finally know! We'll certainly be resting easy tonight.
