You can tell a lot about a goat from the state of its poops. As gross as it is to think about, feces is filled with facts about an animal’s diet, gut health, and other biological details about the individual and species.
For example, a pellet poop that is mostly round but with one pointy tip can mean too much protein. Why do goats poop pellets?
Goats poop pellets because of the way their diet and digestive system work together. A goat’s diet is incredibly fibrous and has a lot of silica inside it, so it doesn’t form up into softer, longer shapes the way a carnivore or omnivore’s meaty diet can. A goat’s four-compartment stomach extracts nourishment leaving little behind to excrete.
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Why Do Goats Poop Little Pellets
The answer to why goats poop hard, dry little pellets has everything to do with their environment and how they evolved to cope with it.
If you’ve ever seen a picture of a goat halfway up a sheer cliff face eating the tiniest strands of grass, then it’s easy to see that they don’t necessarily get an abundance in nature.
Goats can eat almost anything plant-based and organic because they have to. Domestic goats are spoiled for choices, but in the high mountains and other areas where goats thrive naturally, they get slim pickings and not a lot of water to go with it.
As a result, they pull every last drop of water and nutrition they can from whatever sources they find.
Goats will even drink urine for the salt and minerals, and their bodies can process it because of their multi-chambered stomach and uniquely adapted diet.
The result of using all of these survival skills is that they put less out the back end. Hence, goats poop little, primarily dry, pellets. It’s all they have left to expel.
Goats Digestive System
A goat’s digestive system passes from the esophagus, connecting the mouth and the rumen. This first stomach can hold up to two gallons of food.
Here food gets broken down and ferments before the goat burps it back up for a second round of chewing.
The reticulum holds excess food from the rumen and also returns them upward as cud for rechewing.
After this stage, the food is ready for the omasum, where enzymes break the food particles down, and long folds help pull any remaining water out.
Finally, food goes to the abomasum, which works like a more normal stomach breaking things down entirely so they can get pooped out.
If you want more in-depth information on how goats’ digestive systems work, I recommend this delightful and informative video presentation.
Do Baby Goats Poop Pellets
Baby goats do not poop pellets right away but rather develop their digestive system over their first few weeks of life. However, there is a definite progression of poops that healthy baby goats follow.
I’ve made a quick list below for the stages of baby goat poop.
- Meconium – This black, tar-like poop is the first poo for mammal babies like goat kids. Usually, this happens in the first one to two days and has virtually no smell.
- Yellowy Soft Logs – Baby goats eat a diet that is entirely milk for the first couple of weeks. The darker brown color of adult goat poop requires plant matter, so yellow is normal. Additionally, milk has more water than older goat’s food, so you get log-like stools, sometimes called yellow pudding poops. These sticky poops smell like sour milk.
- Yellow Berries – By the time a kid is ten to twenty days old, they will have a more developed digestive tract. Their poops will start to come out in clusters of yellow to brown ‘grapes’ that look more like adult goat poops.
- Brown Berries – Sometime between two and four weeks of age, goats finally start pooping brown spheres like the adult goats. This is a sign that they are eating hay, and their stomach and digestive system are adjusting correctly as they grow. Some little goats develop faster and slower, so it’s okay if the babies take a little longer than four weeks to get to this stage.
Do Goats Always Poop Pellets
Goats always poop pellets. However, slight variations on the mostly uniform, round poops can indicate that something is off. It’s vital for goats to eat a balanced diet so they, and their poops stay healthy.
A goat with pointy pellets likely has too much protein in their diet. They will need you to cut back on any protein you’ve been incorporating into their diets.
Likewise, sticky, clumped together pellets are often a sign of illness, intestinal worms or a food that is new and didn’t sit well in their stomach. Meanwhile, dry, crushed together poops are a sign the goat had constipation.
What Should Healthy Goat Poop Look Like
Goat poop is supposed to be round, and smallish. Many pellets will come out the size of human fingernails and a very dark brown to black color. However, baby goats will naturally poop smaller than the adults.
According to MannaPro, “Normal Goat Pellets: Goat droppings should consist of hard, solid, oval-shaped pellets. They should be dark brown in color and separated, meaning not clumped together. Anytime the bacteria balance in a goat’s digestive system becomes out of whack, diarrhea can occur.”
Helpful Tips To Know About Why Goats Poop Pellets
Thanks to a goat’s incredibly efficient digestive system, they poop little pellets. By conserving as much as they can from every bite, goats have become excellent survivors.
Here are more helpful tips to know about why goat poop pellets.
- Both milk and grains go directly to the abomasum section of the stomach when goats eat them. These two things don’t need extra digestion or chewing, so they skip ahead.
- Goats have evolved more than a strong stomach and small pelletized poops to survive. By living in groups and sounding the alarm anytime the slightest threat is detected, goats have a fairly calm, playful and pleasant herd life. Plus, they combine their gastronomic magic with superb climbing skills to stay away from predators. The poop is just a small part of a larger life strategy.
- Goats need nutrients added to their food. A mineral-deficient goat may seek salt out by drinking pee or even licking the sweat of other animals and humans.
Final Thoughts
It’s amazing what you can learn by looking at a little poop. Trackers have used droppings for most of human history to find food animals, like goats, by identifying their droppings.
As ruminant herbivores, goats are great for meat and milk, plus they are easy to feed as well. A goat’s highly adapted four-chambered stomach and incredible ability to digest most things means they were a perfect choice to domesticate.
The ability to draw so much water and nutrition from sources other creatures can’t even process is a stroke of evolutionary genius.
Best of all, unlike some herbivores such as cows and horses, those little pellet poops are also easier to clean up. Goats droppings help them in the wild and make them desirable livestock.
