Smart sheep that can pick out Barack Obaaaaaama
YOU might think sheep would have only a woolly sense of what humans look like.
But with a bit of training, they are rather good at recognising faces, a study found.
After Welsh mountain sheep were shown photos of four celebrities – Barack Obama, Emma Watson, actor Jake Gyllenhaal and newsreader Fiona Bruce – they were able to pick them out when they were presented next to photos of people they had not seen before.
The Cambridge University study built on research showing sheep recognise their flockmates. The team showed the sheep a picture of one of the celebrities next to the unknown face, with a button below each screen that they could press with their heads. If they selected the button below the star, they got a reward of food pellets in a tray below.
To check they really recognised the stars rather than just a single photo, the scientists then tested them with pictures taken from different angles.
The eight sheep could still identify the celebrities from tilted angles, although their success rate was 15 per cent worse than when the photos were face-on, the study, published in the Royal Society Open Science journal, found. Humans are also not as good at recognising people from an angle.
video footage showed the sheep pausing to think and weighing up both images before deciding. Lead researcher Dr Jenny Orton said the sheep were ‘surprisingly good at discriminating’, but added: ‘I don’t think this is a unique ability to sheep. I think any animal with a large brain should be able to do this.’ She also said that while the sheep were motivated by the food, it appeared they also enjoyed simply solving the problem as sometimes they did not bother eating the pellets.
It is hoped the experiment can be used to help understand and test treatments for Huntington’s disease, which causes dementia and movement problems. Often sufferers cannot recognise familiar faces.