Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
animal production and thus human well-being, especially
in regions where sown pastures cannot be grown. It does
this in part by being able to actively browse in both the
quadripedal and the bipedal modes. Popular writings on
goat feeding behavior claim that bipedal grazing is the key
to browsing success, but when measurements have been
made, a surprisingly small proportion of time is spent
browsing in this mode. Nevertheless, goats undoubtedly
browse much more than do sheep or cattle.
However, as this chapter has also demonstrated, the goat
can also use sown pastures well and is thus a successful
intermediate feeder. Claims that goats will reject legumes
like white clover are not supported by experimental results,
which show that goats can produce well on perennial rye-
grass/white clover pastures.
Published evidence suggests that goats do tend to digest
forage slightly better than do sheep, but by an amount
which would be of little practical signifi cance. Similarly,
the evidence that goats eat more of a given diet than sheep
is equivocal. Goats do appear to have a higher ME require-
ment for maintenance, so to maintain weight, they would
need to eat more of a given diet than sheep. However, it
does not necessarily follow that goats will have higher
voluntary
intakes than sheep.
A fruitful area for future work on ingestive behavior and
intake by the goat would be to resolve the issue of how it
deals with the high condensed tannin loads with which it
is occasionally confronted. There is no doubt that it does
cope, but the mechanisms remain unclear. Recent experi-
mental results suggest that the role of tannin-binding pro-
teins in saliva may have been overstated, but further work
is required to clarify this.
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plant wax components to estimate intake, digestibility and
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Doyle , P.T. , J.K. Egan , and A.J. Thalen . 1984 . Intake, diges-
tion, and nitrogen and sulphur retention in Angora goats
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of Experimental Agriculture and Animal Husbandry
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Mammalian Herbivores: How Far Have We Come in 25
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sheep and fi bre - producing goats . Small Ruminant Research
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Hetherington , L. 1977 . All About Goats , pp. 37 - 38 . Farming
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Lamy , E. , G. da Costa , A. Capela e Silva , J. Potes , A.V.
Coelho , and E.S. Baptista . 2008 . Comparison of electro-
phoretic protein profi les from sheep and goat parotid saliva.
Journal of Chemical Ecology 34 : 388 - 397 .
Landau , S. , A. Perevolotsky , D. Kababya , N. Silanikove , R.
Nitzan , H. Baram , and F.D. Provenza . 2002 . Polyethylene
glycol affects goats' feeding behaviour in a tannin-rich
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Luo , J. , A.L. Goetsch , I.V. Nsahlai , J.E. Moore , M.L. Galyean ,
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