Goats Can Recall Puzzle Solutions Nearly a Year After Learning Them [VIDEO]

When it comes to getting a bite to eat, goats have great memory for where the food is.

New research from Queen Mary University London reveals that goats trained to solve a puzzle to access a food reward are able to recall the solution to the puzzle nearly a year later.

The goat's cleverness and ability for holding on to information could be a reason why they are able to adapt to harsh environments and have been successfully introduced to new locales.

Writing in the journal Frontiers in Zoology, Elodie Briefer and her colleages report on the goat's ability to learn and recall.

The scientists trained goats to pull a lever with their mouths to unlock a box, which they could then open to access a food reward.

The goats' ability to remember the skill was checked after one month and again at 10 months. Even after nearly a year had passed, nine out of 12 goats were able to recall how to access the food within two minutes of being reintroduced to the puzzle.

"The speed at which the goats completed the task at 10 months compared to how long it took them to learn indicates excellent long-term memory," said Briefer, who began the research at Queen Mary and is now based at ETH Zurich.

Before being reintroduced to the puzzle, some of the goats were given the opportunity to watch the puzzle being solved by another goat.

"We found that those without a demonstrator were just as fast at learning as those that had seen demonstrations. This shows that goats prefer to learn on their own rather than by watching others," Briefer said in a statement.

The researchers said this study was the first to investigate how goats learn complex physical cognition tasks. The goats' ability to solve puzzles and recall memories may be a reason why the animals are so adaptable, the researchers said.

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," said study co-author Alan McElligott from Queen Mary's School of Biological and Chemical Sciences.

"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," he said.