Goats are ruminant mammals, ones that we domesticated thousands of years ago. They spend several hours per day feeding, somehow, they manage to eat as much grass as they can find. When grass is abundant, they pasture all over the fields... But, when things get hard, they are able to explore really steep and rocky surfaces to look for food, places that would be a real challenge for a human mountain climber.

Tree-Climbing Goats.

Southwest of Morocco, where the average rainfall is 300mm/year it is usual to see this:

Pioneer goats - Source in Photo

No, it is not a circus trick, they are goats eating Argan's fruits and leafs. During Autumn, when the pastures are nearly none, goats spend most of their time, climbed up to trees: Pasturing Argans.

In this area, the Argan woods occupied -because they were reduced up to a 50%- 400000 hectares, in them 20 to 30% of the Morocan goats lived.

Argan woods (Argania spinosa) are ecologically and economically important to the south of that country. They are a shield against the desertification and provide the local population with wood, cattle feed and oil (it is a rather famous beauty product).

Argan branch with leafs and fruit - Source in Photo

Extreme pasturing.

Is this strange pasturing affecting the Argans?
It looks like it isn't, or at least, this is what the magazine "Frontiers Ecology and the Environment" said. They performed a study that revealed that the goats disgorge the Argan seeds. More than 70% of them are viable for growing a new plant.

This would be a new way those seeds may disperse now. An alternative to endozoochory a process of seed dispersion that relies on frugivorous animals (The ones that feed, mostly, on fruits). In this case, the seeds "travel" in the digestive system of the animals that fed on the respective fruits to lather be expelled.

Here, the Moroccan goats feed on the Argan fruits, and, since they don't like the huge seeds, they disgorge them somewhere else. Without knowing, they are reforesting the country!