Original photo by Vicki L. Mille/ Shutterstock
When is a goat not a goat? When it can be spotted on a rail-thin rock crevasse at an altitude of 13,000 feet in the northwestern United States and Canada. That animal, while seemingly possessing the stubbornness attributed to the goats found at petting zoos, is actually the biologically distinct mountain goat, the lone extant species of the genus Oreamnos.
Oops, incorrect!
It's a factAs with trees, mountain goats reveal their ages by the rings that appear on their keratinized horns. No rings materialize during their first winter, but they emerge in each successive year after that.
While related to domestic and wild goats within the Bovidae family, mountain goats belong to the Rupicaprini tribe, a subdivision of "goat antelopes" that includes fellow rock-climbing creatures such as the goral and chamois. Anatomically, rupicaprids differ from other bovids by featuring short, dagger-like horns atop thinner, lighter skulls. Mountain goats have also developed specific features that would feel strange to their cousins in the petting zoo, namely the thick, double layer of fur and suction cup-like hooves that allow them to survive in cold, treacherous environments.
Behavior-wise, male mountain goats are more deferential to females than their domestic cousins. They're also far less likely to engage in the sort of head-butting waged between playful kids and competing rivals among true goat herds, due to the potential for injury from those sharp horns. But lest you think these animals suffer from a courage deficiency, just think about how brave you'd be leaping between cliffs more than 2 miles above sea level.
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A group of mountain goats is called a ______.
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A group of mountain goats is called a band.
Mountain goats enjoy refreshing themselves with human urine.
Most guides will advise keeping a safe distance from mountain goats, but sometimes the animals get a little more close and personal than we’d like. That’s what started happening in Washington’s Olympic National Park, where the ever-growing mountain goat population developed a taste for the salt in human urine and sweat. Although it can make for a fun campfire story or blog post, a brush with these normally elusive wild animals can be dangerous. Furthermore, the increasingly emboldened creatures have been found to be disrupting the ecosystem by trampling and gobbling up vegetation. In response, the National Park Service in 2018 began airlifting mountain goats to the nearby North Cascades National Park, a locale with plenty of the naturally occurring mineral deposits needed to supplement their diets, and fewer of the freely urinating hikers just waiting to blog about their close encounters with intruding wildlife.
Tim Ott has written for sites including Biography.com, History.com, and MLB.com, and is known to delude himself into thinking he can craft a marketable screenplay.
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