Twenty plus years ago I was hiking on the North York Moors in England, which is an area where herds of sheep live wild on the moorland for most of the year. I came to a cattle grid (cattle guard in the US [1]) and a group of sheep were crowded at one side, obviously wanting to cross but unable to do so. Lots of baaaing and jostling.
Then one of the sheep did an amazing thing: it lay down and rolled it's body over the cattle grid, then stood at the other side staring at the rest of the group. They didn't follow, and eventually drifted away.
I've never seen or heard of that happening before or since. I sometimes wonder if that sheep was some kind of once-in-a-generation freak: a kind of Leonardo da Vinci outlier.
> While these barriers are usually effective for cattle,[23] they can fail due to ingenious animals. Sheep searching for food have been known to roll over grids, jump across them, step carefully into the spaces[24] or run along the side of grids as wide as 8 feet (2.4 m).
The very next video youtube suggested shows two sheep, surrounded by lush green fields, climbing onto steep, wet rocks on a hillside in an attempt to reach some grass in the middle of the rocks. One of the sheep falls, presumably to its death or at least to a significant injury. They may be clever, but they seem... dumb.
Thanks. I only included the wikipedia link for clarity due to the different terminology used across the world. But its interesting to know that what I saw is not as unusual as I thought.
There are stories of one sheep doing this in the UK and then a week later all of them doing it - usually the solution is to dig the void under the grid deeper so the sheep don't dare risk falling.
They may not lack intelligence but they are not fun. They are boring. They keep to themselves. They are very "sheepish". They are not emotional, except horny rams. They don't socialize with humans. They are scared of everything. They are herdish and their herd makes dumb decisions. Very few of them are outliers in behavior/intelligence. I grew up with sheep. I 'm sorry sheep, you are dumb.
I also grew up around large flocks of sheep and found that when you isolate a young lamb and socialize it: lots of fun. Socialized lambs will recognize human friends and will respond to a given name and hang around and play. But after a year or two, after any time spent back with the flock, they forget humans and revert to being one with the herd. Older isolated sheep just get mean and end up being lawnmowers if not mutton. I figured we'd just bred the fun out of them, with a small remaining playfulness coming out while a lamb. I'd be curious to know more about wild sheep.
Growing up an a hobby farm with 20-40 (depending on the time of year), this is my experience too. Lambs are playful and full of spunk, but as they grow older they quickly become full-time grazing machines. Rams are just vicious.
My favorite was the person who happened to be burning a boat for fuel when it was being debated whether a crew could survive a shipwreck for years by using the ship as a fuel source. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10803552
Aggressive rams are partially a byproduct of testosterone and selective breeding, some small scale farmers will leave rams in with ewes and their newborns to protect them from predators.
goats are way more entertaining. i grew up working on a farm that had about 20 head of sheep, 20 nubian goats for milk, and a handful of pygmies for meat.
Goats are fascinating. Sheep largely keep to themselves.
I used to have 7 and just handed off my last two to another hobby farm. Even after 9 years Red my oldest doe, was friendly, curious, and very social. Sundance, her oldest wether, was playful and very dog like.
I don't own sheep but did spend some time with them and came to the same conclusion. However I also don't think that research is incorrect. As such I am assuming the missing link is the learning part: is it possible they are capable enough but being in a herd suppresses this / has no use for it so it doesn't come out? Due to lack of stimulants, lack of apparent need to learn something?
Well, regardless, if one of my sheep walks to the end of a 20 foot fence and around it to the other side, then wants to come back when I wave a bucket of grain at it, it stares at me through the fence in utter consternation as to how it can pass by this impossible barrier, then starts pacing back and forth anxiously as though lamenting its misfortune at being caught in such a complex trap.
Domestic sheep have been bred to produce more wool, not jump fences, and to be herd-bound and submissive. That started millennia ago.[1] Unless you find wild sheep, you're not seeing the normal animal; you're seeing a human-created meat and wool machine.
I grew up on a sheep farm. I disagree with this article. I found them to be almost pathologically fatalistic and idiotic. Perhaps there's something to be said about domestication having a negative cognitive effect, or inbreeding, or some other factor. But these animals were not intelligent.
Heck, I've done substitute teaching in a relatively affluent suburb of Austin, Texas and I find there are some really dim human creatures amongst us. Factors you noted all potentially relevant. It's frustrating to hear somebody say "Oh just reason with them!" when sometimes a certain contingent of 14 year olds are kind of lacking whip cracking in the bigger picture.
They are horribly dumb, especially compared to other farm animals like cows or pigs.
I worked in a farm as a teenager. Getting sheep out of trouble was a secondary duty.
Highlights:
- One managed to hang itself from a large garbage can full of grain when a kid left it open. It literally jumped up to try and get in, and got stuck on rim.
- Remember the Disney "chip and dale" episode where they borrowed Donald Duck's sailboat to get nuts from a tree on a little island? 3 sheep tried to do that without a boat and drowned.
- Another somehow impaled itself on farm machinery in the middle of a 10 acre field. No idea why.
> found that they can recognise and remember at least 50 individual faces for more than 2 years. That is longer than many humans.
What? I was under the impression that humans could generally remember long-term hundreds of faces, if not thousands. You may not always be able to remember everyone's name, but you remember their face.
The idea of someone not being able to remember even fifty individual faces sounds bizarre to me, unless we're talking about a person with a serious mental handicap.
Particularly when you haven't seen countless thousands of other faces in the meantime.
As an anecdote, I used to work with large groups of children (summer camps & sports programs). I would allow myself one day to learn all of the new kids' names, which was > 50 at the start of any new thing.
I don't remember all of their names now, after 10-15 years, but I assure you that you could give me a lineup (of them at the time) and I could pick out the kids I worked with. Hundreds and hundreds of them.
I wouldn't have a 100% success rate, no doubt, but I think a very good one.
Typical science articles bullshit we see around all the time. The funny thing is the author is technically not lying because I am sure we could find "many", that is, at least 2, humans who can't recognize more than 50 faces.
May experience is that the sheep most farmers have are quite stupid.
I have grown up owning huskies and taken said huskies on trips on mountains where sheep roam free.
I have been struggling to hold back a husky literally meters away from sheep before.
They will just look stupidly at the lethal predator and make no attempt to get away.
They have been bred to be easier to handle (aka dumb) and would likely have been eaten in the wild.
The sheep that I know are very friendly. The flock is now about 9, having been about 16 a couple of years ago. My stepsister loves them and introduced me to them. If you walk quietly and gently into the field, and kneel and look unthreatening, they will comms to you. Some are friendlier than others, some too shy. But some will come over and get petted like a lovely soft dog. Beware, some will even try to kiss you!
My experience is sheep are fear driven and goats are lust driven. As a heard, sheep easily panic and run while goats will knock electric fence down to get at food.
I had a goat that would crawl on her side under an electric, wiggling an inch at a time, bellowing every time the fence would shock her, but determined to get at the same grass on the other side of the fence that was on her side.
Then one of the sheep did an amazing thing: it lay down and rolled it's body over the cattle grid, then stood at the other side staring at the rest of the group. They didn't follow, and eventually drifted away.
I've never seen or heard of that happening before or since. I sometimes wonder if that sheep was some kind of once-in-a-generation freak: a kind of Leonardo da Vinci outlier.
I like sheep.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cattle_grid