Gordon, a professor and researcher at the CSIRO Davies Laboratory in Aitkenvale, Australia, and his colleagues recruited ten male Scottish Blackface sheep (species
Ovis aries) and ten male feral hybrid goats (
Capra hircus), as taste testers for the study.
The researchers treated nutritionally-enhanced food pellets with a range of synthetic, human-grade flavorings, avoiding the bitter flavors goats and sheep tend to dislike. After the animals fasted for an hour, the researchers presented basins containing the flavored feeds for 30 minutes.
By weighing each basin at the end of the taste test, the researchers determined how much food of each flavor the ruminants consumed. As for humans, a cleaner plate — or in this case basin — revealed some distinct preferences.
Both sheep and goats chowed down on the more pungent, earthy flavored feeds, shunning strawberries.
"My view regarding these flavors is that they are highly attractive, even though rare, because of health affects associated with consumption, for example anti-parasitic (action on) worms for garlic and onion," Gordon told Animal Planet News.
He also explained that truffles, onions and the actual other foods associated with the flavors were not given to the animals because the researchers only wanted to study the animals' preferences for flavors alone, independent of nutritional content.
Alan Duncan, a nutritional ecologist at The Macaulay Institute in Aberdeen, Scotland, told Animal Planet News that the flavor rankings "make sense."
"Both species tended to prefer flavors they might naturally encounter, such as the fungi-type truffle flavor and the onion and garlic flavors, which are found in the wild representatives of both cultivated vegetables," Gordon explained. "The fruity flavors tended to be avoided, and this is unsurprising since fruits do not generally feature in the repertoire of natural foods encountered by ruminant herbivores."
He added, "I was slightly surprised that sheep showed stronger preferences than goats. Sheep are predominantly a grazing animal, whereas goats readily consume shrubs and woody vegetation."
Now that these preferences are known, Gordon and Duncan suggested, the flavors might be added to feed to encourage livestock to eat, particularly when new foods are introduced.
Name: Domestic Goat (
Capra hircus)
Primary Classification: Bovidae (Cattle, Goats, Antelopes and Relatives)
Location: Originally Central Asia; today, worldwide
Habitat: Originally steep hills and mountainsides; today, wherever there is grass for grazing
Diet: Grasses, shrubs, leaves, twigs, berries and almost any other type of plant material
Size: Averages 3.5 ft in length and 99 lbs in weight
Description: White, black, red or brown in color; cloven hooves; short tail that curves upward; males have beard and large, hollow horns directed upward, backward and outward; females have short horns
Cool Facts: It may have been the first hoofed animal that was ever tamed, some 8,000 or 9,000 years ago. Males emit a rank odor during the breeding season to attract females. The bottom of its hoof is shaped somewhat like a suction cup, which allows it to leap from rock to rock without slipping.
Conservation Status: Common
