Headbutting goats self-inflict traumatic brain injury.

Is the title of the newest research out of the CVN lab! Because it is a preprint, this means the work has not yet been peer reviewed, so keep that in mind.

That being said, this work encompasses the last 3.5 years of research done in our lab and I am very proud to have it available to the public!

A very short summary of the work is that we inspired by our previous work on wild bovids sustaining TBI and decided to investigate this phenomenon in domestic goats to potentially use them as a TBI model.

We observed three goats, Alvin, Simon, and Theo, over six months. We counted each individual headbutt (see our livestream post for how that works) and measured clinically-relevant metrics such as monthly biomarker measurement in CSF, blood, and saliva. We also performed PET-MRI scans on goats for the first time, and et the end of the experiment, detected cellular markers of early TBI in the brain tissue.

This study has shown that goats have potential as a model for neurodegeneration, as headbutting can lead to increasing brain damage. A large animal model such as the goat may help improve the model translation gap in the field of neurodegenerative diseases.

Read it here:

https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.06.26.734585v1

This research was approved by the Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee.