Why sheep aren't nearly as sheeplike as we've been told

ANOTHER LIFE:THE SHEEP ON the lawn at daybreak tested my goodwill with a few more illicit mouthfuls, then lolloped away into the shadows. I followed at a gentle distance, down into the trees and through a mangrove tangle of ancient fuchsia branches. A tuft of wool on barbed wire finally betrayed the point of trespass: a wind-toppled bush had flattened the fence just enough for the sheep, poised on the grassy hedge bank, to pick her way forward.

Bush saw and binder twine enabled a lash-up for yet another time being.

Such episodes are no surprise on the hungry eve of lambing (or “yeaning”, as my neighbours prefer). What interested me about this one was that, by all behavioural accounts, sheep avoid shadows and always move towards the light. But this animal had crossed from a sunny bank into deep tree shadows, without a blade of grass in sight, to reach, at some dark distance, a lawn it could never have seen (but perhaps could smell on the breeze).

The puzzle pales when set against recent discoveries about the mental capacities of sheep. So often thought stupid, subject to unreasonable mass terrors and quite incapable of deciding which way to run off the road, they turn out to be discriminating individuals, with substantial memories and capacity for conscious thought and emotion. Much of this has probably been intuited by farmers for generations, but the science can still impress.

Dr Keith Kendrick is head of the Laboratory of Cognitive and Behavioural Neuroscience at the Babraham Institute, in Cambridge, England. He has been leading experiments on sheep for decades, studying the workings of the neural systems of their brains as they respond to what they see or smell, or to other chemical cues. This is not, necessarily, for the ultimate benefit of sheep (though some may have spun off in the process) but for closer understanding of mammalian responses in general.

Many of the conclusions rest on the ability of the sheep to remember old faces, whether of others in a flock or of humans. Set to gaze at pictures of faces and encouraged by food rewards, they learned to remember 50 other sheep faces, some for more than two years. Even more significantly for neurobiology, they were using the same specialised neural cells, on the right side of the brain, as humans.

These also encoded not only the absent faces but also how the sheep felt about them. And while those of dogs and humans usually carried “a common negative emotional significance”, a familiar human face, on sufficient acquaintance, and doing friendly things like bringing food, earns being encoded with those of fellow sheep. Indeed, sheep shut stressfully into an isolation chamber can be calmed down by being shown pictures of sheep or people they know and feel good about: their hearts slow, they bleat less, their adrenalin falls.

Vets, farmers and zoo keepers could conceivably make use of all this. And, as Kendrick’s team suggested in 2004, “One method of relieving separation anxiety in young children may also be to give them pictures of their parents to carry.”

The link between recognising faces and responding appropriately to their expressions seems often to break down in human afflictions such as autism and schizophrenia, so to find it working in the same neural systems in sheep and people guarantees their laboratory careers – scalp electrodes, heart monitors, post-mortem brain analysis and all.

Sheep now rate with monkeys in the study of individual facial recognition and recollection, skills the animals clearly use as part of their normal lives. Their response to chemical signals has also been under research. Oxytocin, for example, the “love hormone” that figures in human birth and breastfeeding, also bonds the ewe with her lambs and compels her fierce denial of milk to the young of any other mother.

The past few decades have taught us a lot about the common sensibilities of mammals and other species. The intelligence of so many fellow creatures, from chimpanzees to crows, continues to amaze, and where memory and conscious thought exist, emotional capacity cannot be far away.

The sudden gleam of newborn lambs will brighten the hillside in coming weeks, and the bleating of lambs and their anxious mothers will rise at times to an irritating background chorus. Lambs can take a month, perhaps two, to recognise their mothers, and shrill bleats seek their location as they wander off to play.

Meanwhile, if the ewe should appear on the lawn again, I will put on my smiley Obama T-shirt and inquire, in the friendliest manner, how the devil she managed to get in this time. One likes to be well remembered, even by a sheep.

Eye on nature

On March 13th I saw several swallows at Delvin river estuary at Gormanston Beach, in Co Meath. They were flying around the railway viaduct.

Johnny Fortune, Balbriggan, Co Dublin

March 13th was early for swallows arriving in Ireland. They may well have arrived even earlier on the south coast.

I saw a rat swimming in a lake, but when it saw my dog it dived to the bottom, and I saw no sign of it surfacing nearby. Can rats swim underwater?

Picia Harvey Kelly, Killucan, Co Westmeath

Yes, reports say that they can stay down for up to 15 minutes.

The water level on Lough Ree, just north of Athlone, in Co Westmeath, has dropped by several metres, and there is much stranded frog- and pikespawn in danger of drying out. I moved as much as I could down into the water.

Cathy Mac Aeavey, Rathfarnham, Dublin 14

I use a humane mouse trap and let the mice out in the field nearby. But they seem to have long shaggy coats and are dark brown to black. Are these baby rats or have the mice winter coats?

Janice Conboy, Clontarf, Dublin 3

They are probably baby rats, as mice don’t have shaggy fur.

Michael Viney welcomes observations at Thallabawn, Carrowniskey PO, Westport, Co Mayo, or e-mail viney@anu.ie. Please include a postal address