It’s widely assumed that sheep lack intelligence but Wade Muggleton disagrees – and so will you when you find out why!
It’s a commonly held belief that sheep are stupid, really stupid. Dumb. Possibly the dumbest of all domesticated animals. I was once told the amusing anecdote by a professional shepherdess “that a sheep’s ambition in life is to die… and a successful shepherd or shepherdess is one who prevents it from fulfilling that ambition”.
Sheep will fall in ponds and streams and drown themselves, get hooked up in briars and get stuck and immobilised in hedges.The larger lowland breeds can even roll on their backs and then just get stuck there until they die or some passing walker, or the farmer comes along and rolls them back onto their legs. In short, sheep are on the face of it, and are regularly claimed to be, pretty stupid creatures…
NO ANIMALS ARE REALLY STUPID
They need a degree of cleverness to survive. So, sheep might appear to only be dumb sheep, but they have what they need to survive, and whilst they might appear as woolly grass munchers, they can sometimes surprise, and as with most animals the more time you spend around them or observing them, you might see some surprising behaviour.
I was taken aback when I first witnessed what was either remarkable behaviour or an opportunist chance interaction. My two easy care ewes were beneath a damson tree and with one stood close to the trunk, beneath the tree’s canopy. The other one lurched up placing her front feet on the first ewe’s back and was so able to reach up and pluck damsons from the tree at a height she could never have reached on all fours. The first ewe seemed neither startled nor bothered about being used as a step up and made no attempt to move away. It turned out not to be a one-off observation as I saw it happen twice more in the following few days of the peak damson season. Bearing in mind I am not there that much, it could well have happened far more times unseen.
So, was this teamwork? Learnt behaviour? An inter sheep pact? I of course have noway of knowing, but it was effective and suggested a degree of ingenuity and to a degree, problem solving.
Photo ©: X
This article extract was taken from the February 2025 edition of The Country Smallholder. To read the article in full, you can buy the issue here.
