Sheepology

Many human individuals and groups, past and present, have praised sheep for their wit, kindness, stoicism, social competence, the capacity to form and maintain long lasting relationships and peaceful societies, and many other positive features intrinsic to this majestic species. The dominant western tradition, fuelled by toxic patriarchy and separation of the human from the rest of earthly existence, has, in its representation, distorted the true nature of sheep and turned them into nothing more than ‘dumb followers’. Fortunately, all lies have short legs, and even this misled human population is now beginning to perceive sheep for who they truly are, namely individuals with complex internal lives and sophisticated social structures.

Given the prejudice against sheep, for a long time western science and scholarship more broadly, didn’t pay much attention to sheep (scientists and scholars are also just humans and as such heavily influenced by the culture that's shaped them). They thought sheep weren’t interesting so they didn’t study sheep the way they studied some other species, such as chimpanzees and other primates. As a result, there wasn’t much data available to show how interesting sheep actually are! The absence of such data enabled the myths about sheep being uninteresting, dumb, and so on… to continue.

Then some humans started to get really tired of all the nonsense, rolled up their sleeves and got to work. One of these humans was Thelma Rowell. Thelma trained as a primatologist (someone who studies primates). While primatology initially also lacked methodological sophistication, over time it developed good systems to investigate primates more holistically. As a result, a more accurate picture of these animals’ individual and social fabrics began to emerge. Thelma, aware of the fact that if you don’t look you won’t find, decided to study sheep using methods from primatology. Essentially, she started to ask more interesting research questions and, as a consequence, she received more interesting answers.

Thelma was primarily concerned with sheep social organisation, while others have looked into other aspects of sheep life and being. Over the years we’ve discovered that sheep have amazing memories, they can remember faces of sheep and others over longer periods of time, they can read facial expressions, they can solve mazes, their cognitive capacities are comparable to those of macaque monkeys (macaques are considered the gold-standard lab animal to test cognitive function! Of course we don’t approve of using any animal for experimental purposes, but this comparability shows that sheep are really smart), and many other things.

Sheep are all but blind followers, their social relations are extremely complex and varied, there’s a lot of thinking and decision making involved in everything they do. While a peaceful and synchronised group has many benefits, it doesn’t come automatically, even for sheep. Like humans, sheep too have to work at it, and teach and learn how to establish peace and how to keep it. As any society, sheep societies are also composed of individuals with their own characters, preferences, moods, cognitive capacities, psychological landscapes, etc. There will always be troublemakers, but there will also always be those who step in to protect the weaker parties and re-establish balance. That’s perhaps one of the most valuable thing humans could learn from sheep: their strong commitment to peace-keeping.

The more we understand other animals, the more evident it becomes that, while there is immense diversity on so many levels across individuals and species, other animals are completely comparable to humans in everything that counts. This of course also holds for sheep: they love, they grieve, they enjoy good food and good company, they hate being alone, they need cognitive stimulation and get bored without it, they love their babies like humans do their own, they suffer when it’s too hot or too cold and need a shelter that will protect them from both, they like to do things together with other sheep but they also like to stand out and show off, they hurt when humans manipulate their bodies and minds, and, perhaps most importantly, they long for freedom and self-determination as all peoples do; the good news is that we - humans - can help them achieve both!

Check out Animals Australia's The Secret Lives of Sheep.

Selected further reading:

Marino, Lori, and Debra Merskin (2019). Intelligence, complexity, and individuality in sheep. Animal sentience 25(1), DOI: 10.51291/2377-7478.1374

Despret, Vinciane (2005). Sheep do have opinions. In Making things public: atmospheres of democracy. Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel, eds., 360–370. Cambridge: M.I.T. Press.

Armstrong, Philp (2016). Sheep. London: Reaktion Books.