Ruminating on what our goats eat

Hello, Zoo friends far and wide! My name is Rob, and I am a Lead Keeper for Ambassador Animals here at Zoo Atlanta. We love interacting with all our wonderful guests down at the contact yard because we just love talking about the animals. They are our coworkers, our good friends, and considering how much time we spent together, they sometimes feel like our family too.

One of the biggest questions we get often is, just what do our goats eat every day? Well to many, the answer just might be a little surprising; most goats would be perfectly healthy eating hay as their only source of food daily. This is because they are a part of a group of animals called ruminants, which means they have a specialized stomach that helps them get a ton of nutrients out of grass and hay materials that other animals wouldn’t be able to if digested. In short, the way it works is that goats will chew the hay, swallow it, ferment the hay in the first chamber of their digestive system, regurgitate the hay, chew it again, and then swallow it to go through the rest of the digestive system. What this means is this, when you see a goat chewing, it might not be new food in their mouths!

Having explained all that, our goats here are given a wide variety of other foods to eat beside the hay. Goats are natural browsers, meaning that they naturally would be looking at bushes, shrubs, and even trees to find food items. So here at Zoo Atlanta, the goats are given a variety of different plants fresh courtesy of the Horticulture Team. They work so hard to ensure our goats, and all the other herbivores in the Zoo, get all sorts of exciting and delicious plants to eat daily. Once we get the plants, which we call browse, we hang them up around the goats’ area so they can browse for it naturally.

But wait, there’s more! We will also sometimes give different types of vegetables to the goats as enrichment. This will give them something new and exciting to do, while also giving them different types of nutrients not always found in the hay or browse. Plus, the goats do just love to chew on things! To give a short list, vegetables we sometimes give would include squash, celery, carrots, lettuce, pumpkins, and their absolute favorite, bell peppers.

So hopefully that gives all our Zoo friends a short answer to just what our goats at Zoo Atlanta eat. But remember, we love talking with all our friends, so if you visit and have more questions, we can’t wait to see you!  

Rob A.
Lead Keeper, Ambassador Animals