Writing in the journal Frontiers in Zoology today, the scientists trained a group of goats to retrieve food from a box using a linked sequence of steps; first by pulling a lever with their mouths and then by lifting it to release the reward. Credit: Queen Mary University of London 
 
 This is the first time that scientists have investigated how goats learn complex physical cognition tasks, which could explain why they are so adaptable to harsh environments and good at foraging for plants in the wild, for example. We also predicted that if they use any form of social learning, they would be faster at learning after observing a demonstrator, than if they did not have that opportunity. This sequence shows how the goats needed to learn how to retrieve food from a box. Another one learned the lift-lever step, but never learned the other step (goat 9 in Table 1). We tested if all the goats successfully trained on the two-step task (with or without a demonstrator; N = 9 goats), remembered it after retention intervals ranging from 1 month to 9–10 months. For each memory test, all the goats that had successfully learned the task solved it within one trial and less than 2 minutes. Here, we show that their remarkable long-term memory can be generalised across novel cognitive challenges.
– Goats aren't known for being the Einsteins of the animal kingdom, but they're highly adaptable to challenging environments—and that may be because they're a lot smarter than researchers had believed, Phys.org reports. Scientists in London and Switzerland gave goats what they called a "complex foraging task," per their paper published in Frontiers in Zoology: First, the animals had to pull on a rope to get at a lever. Next, they had to lift that lever to get a fruity snack, the Smithsonian reports. Nine of 12 goats tested were able to learn to do so within four tries. Two others tried to cheat using their horns, while one poor sap simply couldn't figure it out after 22 tries. Ten months later, the nine champs were given the task again. Seems they hadn't forgotten what they'd learned: They all got to the fruit within about a minute. "Our results challenge the common misconception that goats aren't intelligent animals; they have the ability to learn complex tasks and remember them for a long time," says the study's co-author. "This could explain why they are so successful in colonizing new environments, though we would need to perform a similar study with wild goats to be sure." Speaking of goat smarts, Smithsonian notes that some goats in Morocco are known to climb trees, and they're not the only animal to surprisingly do so.