What is a goat? What is an egg? What does it mean to “lay an egg,” and what does it mean to “be a goat?” The world is full of mysteries that may never be answered, not even in our wildest dreams.
Goats do not lay eggs. Goats are mammals, and only a certain group of mammals known as monotremes are able to lay external eggs. Goats are not monotremes, and no known goat species has been discovered with the ability to lay eggs. Every recorded goat birth in history has been live.
Well, I guess that answers the question. Goats do not lay eggs. Who would have thought? But if you’re anything like me, you may be wondering why this question even came up in the first place.
Why Do People Think That Goats Lay Eggs?
It turns out that the myth of goats laying eggs goes back at least to depression era Germany, where this picture postcard of a goat protecting its nest full of eggs was published. (You can see the picture on this external blog)
The picture features two mountain goats proudly doing their best to defend a nest full of eggs as big as they are. I don’t have any other really information on those particular goats, but it is evidence that the Goat-egg hoax is approaching a hundred years old at this point.
More recently, goats laying eggs has become something of a meme here on the WORLD WIDE WEB, my favorite example of which is this fabulous website which seems to be attached to this Twitter account.
While I was researching for this article, they did throw me for a bit of a loop, as the account claims to be run by a real life goat. Of course, a goat would know better than anyone whether they lay eggs or not, and so I automatically trusted them.
However, I realized as I was scrolling through their tweet history that there was no way that the goat that runs that Twitter account was telling the truth, since I couldn’t find a single scholarly source on their website. Goats man. They’ll get you.
Another example of this hoax on the wider INTERNET is this adoreable video by North Carolina homesteaders. Okay, calling it a hoax is kind of mean. I don’t think that they actually intend to trick anyone into thinking that goats lay eggs.
Plus, the video features a baby goat, and that makes it a masterpiece in my mind.
However, this video does exemplify the way this myth tends to be treated in the modern day. Most references to goats laying eggs are meant as over the top jokes for people involved in livestock raising communities.
Although, Goats Lay Eggs does explain that baby goats fit inside of tiny eggs by curling up very small, which makes sense to me, and the video does specify that only male goats lay eggs, which explains why female goats are consistently observed giving live birth. Maybe there’s something to all of this…
Goats Don’t Lay Eggs
No. There is not. Goats do not lay eggs. For one thing, there is the issue of the kind of eggs that real life examples of egg laying mammals produce. Monotremes produce leathery eggs more similar to those of reptiles than those of birds.
All of the goat egg hoaxes I’ve seen give the goats eggs that are bird-like, with a hard shell. While this isn’t impossible since monotremes are about as different from goats as I can imagine any mammal being, it does seem likely that if a goat were to produce an egg it would look similar to other mammalian eggs.
The other issue is a purely anatomical one. You see, in order to make egg laying possible, reptiles, birds, and monotremes all have what’s known as a chloaca, which is basically a kind of valve which allows eggs to come out of the same hole (called the vent) as fecal matter. This valve is only present in females, and monotremes have them instead of a vagina.
This means that it wouldn’t really be feasible for an animal that does have a vagina to lay eggs, and female goats do in fact have vaginas. In fact, everything about a goat’s reproduction system points to them giving live birth, a fact which is evidenced by hundreds of years of domestic goats giving live birth on the record.
Why Don’t Goats Lay Eggs?
The difference between giving live birth and laying eggs is an important one evolutionarily. The most likely reason that goats don’t lay eggs is that at some point in the distant past their pre-historic ancestors who were not yet anything like a goat evolved to give live births and it would take extraordinary circumstances for the goats to re-evolve their chloacas.
But there are certain advantages that the goats get from giving live births anyways. Laying eggs really devotes a creature to either spending time and resources protecting them or staying in the same place for an extended period of time.
Goats, however, like to move from field to field to find new places to graze. Not only are pregnant goats fairly mobile, but kids come out mostly able to do things like walk and eat on their own, something that isn’t really true for a lot of young that hatch from eggs.
This gives goats the ability to easily move from place to place with their kids and even while the female goat is still expecting.
Of course, it isn’t like there was ever some kind of evolutionary dialectic where one group of goats independently evolved to give live birth and then crushed the egg-laying goats with superior mobility. Evidence suggests that goats have always given live birth. It’s really jus a coincidence that it happens to be convenient for them.
What Can We Learn?
The world is a strange place, but you can count on any mammal that isn’t either an echidna or a platypus to not lay eggs. Their biology is just wrong. Hmm? Something about not trusting everything you read on the internet? I don’t know, that arboreal octopus website seems so real though!
