Culture &

social learning

Sheep are often ridiculed, by unknowledgeable humans, as dumb followers. As other social animals, including humans, sheep do indeed follow but not always and not anyone. Sheep follow when it’s smart to do so, and in most cases they will follow the oldest (and wisest) ewe. This ‘following’, also known as social learning, is an important ingredient of culture formation. Culture is a big thing in animal societies. Culture emerges as animals spread behaviours and information through social learning horizontally (from peer to peer) or vertically/obliquely (from parents/teachers to children).

Sheep – bighorn sheep – were the first ungulates to equip human scientists with empirical evidence of the culturally-based nature of the herds’ seasonal migrations. Researchers compared ‘historical populations’ (those inhabiting an area for over 200 years) with populations translocated to novel landscapes and discovered a marked difference in migratory propensity between the two groups. The research unveiled the value of cultural knowledge transmission underscoring these migrations. It takes several generations and decades for a translocated society to acquire enough knowledge of the new territory’s food growth cycles to bring migration back to significant levels.

This section features stories of sheep social learning.

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Henry's clever method to reach high branches learnt by other sheep

Text by Teya

Henry has never been able to stand up on his hind legs. This left him deprived of one of the joys the others readily engaged in, namely eating the juicy sprigs, petals and leaves from surrounding trees – the higher the plants the better. One day Henry came up with a creative solution to overcome this disadvantage: starting with the rose bush and later applying it to others: Henry realised that if he managed to grab any part of the branch with his mouth, he could, with patience and care, release it from his mouth and slip it under his chin; with the branch secured between the chin and the neck, he could now slowly move along the branch and eat the leaves and petals on the way. The other sheep have learnt this method from Henry, and now that they are older and their legs wobblier they use Henry’s method all the time.