Caprines: Browsing Goats of the Western Mountains

Alpine chamois

The caprines as a whole can be divided into two groups, depending on which of two different lifestyles they happen to follow. The best known of these, since it is the lifestyle of sheep and "true" goats, is that of the grazing caprines.

Grazers feed fairly indiscriminately, munching down lots of grass and similar plants. In the case of the caprines, they survive in marginal habitats by eating pretty much anything that's available. They range across large areas in search of food, and adopt safety in numbers by packing themselves together in herds. Today, the great majority of caprine species adopt this lifestyle, and it's often what we think of when we think of goats and sheep.

But it appears that, in the evolutionary history of goat-like animals, it's a relatively recent innovation, one that was given a significant boost by the arrival of the Ice Ages. Before that, goats had adopted a rather different lifestyle, and there are still a minority of species - perhaps no more than five - that still live this way.

These apparently "primitive" goats were once grouped together in their own tribe, and given impressive sounding technical names like "rupicaprines" or "naemorhadins", but it's now less clear that they're really related. Instead, they represent at least two evolutionary lines within the goat-like animals, each a relic of the distant past when all goats were like this. Around them, some of their relatives switched to grazing, and, in the long run, proved the more successful.