Goats: According to legend, they are nature’s trash compactors. Able to digest just about anything, they wander the earth consuming everything from tin cans to pine trees. But this is all just a myth, right?
Goats can’t actually digest metal. This myth comes from goats eating the paper labeling and glue residue off of metal cans. Goats will still try to eat anything, but most things that aren’t food they can’t digest, meaning that if a goat eats something like a piece of carpet they will probably die.
Huh. Well that certainly makes goats less fun to tell six year olds about. But goats eating things aside from foods is actually a serious problem.
What Can Goats Digest
The number of things that goats can actually digest is extremely limited. Goats are bovines, specifically they are ruminates, the same type of creature as a deer.
Their primary food source is meant to be grazing, but it’s impossible for them to get all of the nutrients they need from just grazing.
Basically, this means that the only thing that goats are really good at digesting is grass. While they can digest other kinds of plant matter, grass is the thing that their bodies really want.
In order to supplement the low nutritional value of grass, goats also forage all throughout their environment. But their bodies are really designed to digest grass, so there’s actually a limited amount when it comes to how much goats can forage.
If they forage too much, they’ll end up with serious digestive problems. They can even end up dying on accident if they eat to much of the same thing.
This extends to everything else that goats can’t digest. They’re meant to be herbivorous creatures, so they can’t eat anything but plants. This means that if a goat eats too many bugs on accident in the course of eating forage or grazing, they will die of indigestion.
But what about things that aren’t food at all? Well, goats can’t digest those because they aren’t food. If a goat eats, say, a piece of carpet, there’s a good chance that it will block their entire digestive system and eventually kill them one way or another.
Metal is even worse, as it can also cause a bunch of internal damage as it goes down. If a goat eats even a little bit of it, it can end up getting terribly sick. This is known as hardware poisoning, and it can happen to all sorts of animals.
Goats Shouldn’t Eat Many Things, But Sometimes They Do Anyways.
Spend any amount of time learning about goats online and you will eventually find somebody telling a horror story about the time their goat ate something that they really weren’t supposed to and died. Metal, carpet, hemlock, it doesn’t matter. Goats will eat anything, once.
Goats are foraging animals, and they explore their natural habitat by trying to eat different things until they find something that satisfies them.
In nature, this can be a good system, as goats can communicate with the rest of their herd to warn about plants that may be poisonous.
Unfortunately, in captivity there are lots of things goats can eat that aren’t technically poison but that they also can’t digest at all.
This means that goats will try to eat anything that they can reach with their mouths to see if it tastes good, and if they like the taste they’ll keep eating even if it kills them.
This goes for both man-made and natural objects that goats can’t eat. Goats are kind of stupid.
Will Goats Eat Metal
Only if it’s small enough for them to swallow. Goats can’t usually bite metal into small enough pieces to swallow, so they usually can’t eat it even if they try.
But small pieces of metal like nails, screws, or staples are just the right size for goats to feel comfortable trying to eat them, as are thin sheets of metal like cans and foil. This means that goats will eat any little pieces of metal that you leave in their enclosure.
How To Prevent Goats From Eating Non-Food Items
The only way to reliably ensure that goats won’t eat things that aren’t food is to make sure that there isn’t anything in their enclosure that isn’t edible.
Goats will try to eat anything they can reach, anything. This means that any nails in their fence have to be on the outside of the enclosure (Since goats might try to chew through wood to get to them) and that you can’t use any artificial flooring like carpets.
If you’re thinking about giving your goats something, you need to stop and think: Will my goats eat this? If the answer is yes and the thing isn’t food, then don’t give it to the goats
This is really the only way. If you let goats in your house, they will eat your furniture and your drywall, and it will kill them. There’s not really anything you can do to stop it other than keep them somewhere where there’s no way they could possibly eat something that could make them sick.
If you see your goat trying to eat something that they shouldn’t, you need to take it away from them. Goats are creatures of remarkable perserverance, and even if it doesn’t look like they can get to the thing that they want they will probably get to it eventually and then you’ll be in trouble.
This also means that you have to make sure that things like plastic or canvas storage bags or packaging don’t end up in your goat’s enclosure, which can be quite difficult. You just need to watch the goats and learn the art of never giving up, or else you’ll never be able to keep your goats safe.
How To Tell If Your Goat Has Eaten Something That Isn’t Food?
Goats that are supplementing their diet of edible things with something that they shouldn’t eat tend to lose their appetite fairly quickly. If whatever it is they’ve eaten has blocked their digestion, they’ll stop pooping at some point as well.
However, sometimes whatever it is will simply pass through their system providing no nutrients until eventually the goat just dies of malnutrition. It can be really hard to tell if this is happening to your goat as there may not be any active signs.
If you do catch a goat doing this, all you can really do is try to move the goat to somewhere they won’t be able to find Non-Food objects to eat.
