Goats are increasingly kept across a range of farming contexts from dairy production to meat, fibre and vegetation management — each with specific welfare considerations.
Goat welfare is shaped by the enormous diversity of contexts in which they are kept — from extensive African pastoralism to intensive European dairy farming to smallholder multipurpose keeping. Their intelligence and exploratory drive means that barren, monotonous environments cause genuine psychological frustration. Their social nature means isolation is stressful. Their climbing and browsing motivation means flat, substrate-limited environments deny fundamental behavioural expression. A goat that can climb, browse from variety, and interact with companions in stable groups is expressing its full behavioural repertoire; most production systems fall significantly short of this standard.