Often, in comics and on TV, we see the goat as the ornery farm animal that enjoys eating, and will eat anything! There’s a common image in our minds of a goat chewing on a tin can, but walking near a goat pen you would never see that. The myth of goats eating tin cans actually started when a goat was trying to taste a bit of the past from a can’s label.

So if not cans, what do goats eat and why?

While goats may not be the avid tin recyclers we dream of (due to lack of an ability to digest metal), they are specially equipped to eat many foods that we humans couldn’t dream of eating. Their design makes them perfect for foraging for high-fiber, high-energy foods.

Goats fall into a category of animals called “ruminants”. They’re in good company: cows, sheep, and deer are also ruminants. These animals are cud-chewing and cloven hooved, and thus part of the exclusive group of animals God told Moses on Mt. Sinai were clean to eat. This distinction is shaping diets still today in kosher foods. The bigger biological distinction for this group, however, is their four-chambered stomach.

Now, I know what you might be thinking.

“Wow! Four chambers! That seems… excessive.”
But wait! These animals really do need and use all four chambers for the food that they eat. Each chamber has a special design and function.

When food first enters a goat, it will enter through the mouth. This may seem too obvious to put down in words, but it really is an important step in the digestive tract because of the physical and chemical breakdown that happens with chewing and saliva.

Next, the food travels through the esophagus to the rumen. Here’s where it gets interesting.

The rumen is the largest “stomach” a goat has, and can actually hold from three to six gallons of material. This gut is filled with many bacteria that break down the cellulose in the food eaten into volatile fatty acids, which are then absorbed by the rumen wall and used by the goat. Goats’ bacteria friends in their rumens are the reason that they can eat high fiber forages, and why they obtain nearly 80% of their diets energy from activity in the rumen. Goats will periodically “cough up” material from the rumen to rechew as a cud, called rumination, as part of the digestive process.

The reticulum is commonly used as tripe

The next step in the digestive tract is the reticulum. It lies in front of and below the rumen, and serves as a catch for any heavy pieces in the food. It’s honeycombed lining allows it to hold trash that might have gotten swallowed, so that it doesn’t continue down the system.

After the reticulum is the omasum. This organ in distinctively built with long folds, so that it can absorb excess moisture and leftover volatile fatty acids.

From there, food moves to the abomasum. This organ is the closest to a human stomach out of the four. It contains hydrochloric acid and digestive enzymes, which further break down food particles before the material enters the intestines.

In the intestines, the function of the organs is similar to that of human intestines. There is final liquid and nutrition absorption before excretion.

Now, when someone hits you with that fun fact, “cows have four stomachs,” give it right back to them with “goats do too!”

Sources:

animalcorner.co.uk/goat-anatomy/

http://www.goatmilkstuff.com/Goat-Digestive-System.html

http://www.npga-pygmy.com/resources/conformation/ruminant_stomach.asp