Goat

What it is

The domestic goat (Capra hircus; the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, FAO, writes Capra aegagrus hircus) is a small ruminant that people keep mainly for meat, milk, hides and hair. Goats are mainly browsers with an extremely varied plant diet, and this has let them adapt to many different environments.

Range

Goats are widely distributed and are raised in a wide range of farming systems around the world. Most live on smallholder mixed farms. Goats are also an important part of pastoralist herds, and high-value animals are kept for specialised dairy production in temperate regions. FAO publishes global maps of goats per square kilometre for 2010, 2015 and 2020.

What happened

Goats were among the first hoofed animals that people domesticated. Archaeological evidence traces goat domestication back about 10,500 years, to the upper Euphrates valley in southeastern Anatolia. A study of 473 wild bezoar goats, the domestic goat's wild ancestor (Naderi and colleagues, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2008), found that almost all domestic goats today probably come from a domestication centre in eastern Anatolia that may also have reached the northern and central Zagros mountains.

When / status

A living domesticate raised worldwide. FAO's Domestic Animal Diversity Information System (DAD-IS) records livestock breeds and their risk of extinction; it covers around 8,800 breeds of 38 species.

Human role

People keep goats for milk, meat, hides and hair on family farms, in herds that move with pastoralists and on dairy farms.

Sources

• Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO): Livestock Systems, Goats
• Saeid Naderi et al.: The goat domestication process inferred from large-scale mitochondrial DNA analysis of wild and domestic individuals, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2008 (full text in PubMed Central)
• FAO: Domestic Animal Diversity Information System (DAD-IS)