Study: Goats Choose Fine Flavors

May 16, 2006 — Given a choice of flavors, goats and sheep prefer truffle, according to a new study of the animals' food faves.

The study, published in this month’s Small Ruminant Research journal, found that while sheep and goats have similar tastes, sheep have a more discriminating palate.

"Flavor does appear to be more important to sheep than to goats," said Iain Gordon, one of the study’s authors. "We didn’t test why this is the case, but it may be because goats generally have a more catholic diet than do sheep in the natural world, and so will eat a range of things with different flavors."

In order of preference, sheep enjoy truffle, garlic, onion, apple, caramel, maple and orange flavors, according to the new research. Goats prefer truffle, onion, apple and garlic.

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 Discovery 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 Discovery 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.