Lesley Morrell, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Hull in England also not associated with the study, observes that this kind of behavioral modeling may allow us to answer many questions. "There is a huge gap in our knowledge here in that we don't know which, if any, of the movement rules that have been proposed actually operate in real animals," Morrell says.
In addition, co-author Jenny Morton, a neurobiologist at Cambridge, hopes to incorporate this work in her efforts to understand the full repertoire of normal sheep behavior. Morton believes that sheep—with their large brains, developed cortices and relatively long life spans (about 15 years)—may prove stronger model organisms for studying neurodegenerative disease than either rodents or monkeys. She is currently investigating a sheep model of Huntington's and Batten's diseases. By fully detailing sheep social behavior, she hopes to recognize anomalous behavior in diseased sheep as well as track changes over the course of therapeutic treatments.
She adds that her study of the animals has been a continual source of surprises: "They're actually very clever in a 'sheepy' kind of way," Morton says. "They're not going to put a sheep on the moon, but sheep do remember faces, they recognize people and have long memories for complicated things. They're quite curious creatures."
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3 Comments
Add CommentThis is not much different than the herd mentality on Wall Street. The risk of being the lone loser is much more greater the return from being the lone winner, while being a group loser has little risk. Note: this applies to managing the money of others, not one's own money.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI hope they used a different set of sheep when they conducted the experiments otherwise sheep response is an indication of training in other words the same set of sheep will learn how to respond to the dog with which they consecutive experiment. So, for the test to be valid they must use different dogs and different sets of sheep for each test.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisFirst off, sheep are trainable – they are not as stupid as many, especially scientists, think. If a flock has ever been exposed to herd dogs they’ve an idea of what to expect, as mentioned in the second post. Secondly, the confounding factor, as mentioned, is that a lone predator is typically going for a kill because it’s hungry. If it hasn’t targeted its victim it will take the first one it comes to. Packs, especially feral dogs will often kill as many as they can catch as does the occasional cougar or bear, but rarely coyotes. The point being that predators do not interact with sheep the same way herd dogs do. If they really want to understand the relationship between predator and prey use a true wild predator. Its been my experience that a lone coyote or bear will cause the flock briefly break apart and then reform a safe distance from the kill site; whereas a pack of feral dogs and the occasional cougar will result in scattering. What the esteemed scientists should do is to talk to those shepherds that herd sheep in wilderness areas where true predators exist.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisBurt Smith