Study shows sheep can recognise human faces

SCIENTISTS have found that sheep have a celebrity-spotter’s ability to recognise famous faces.

It was already known that ovines can respond to familiar faces, including those of other sheep and humans.

In the new study they demonstrated that – motivated by food – they could recognise screenshot images of celebrity faces.

They were even able to identify faces seen from an angle with about the same success rate as a human.

Lead scientist Prof Jenny Morton, from Cambridge University, said: “Anyone who has spent time working with sheep will know that they are intelligent, individual animals who are able to recognise their handlers. We’ve shown with our study that sheep have advanced face-recognition abilities, comparable with those of humans and monkeys.”

Researchers also discovered that sheep can recognise images of their human handlers without any prior training. Often they did a “double-take” before approaching the face they knew.

The team trained eight sheep to recognise the faces of four celebrities displayed on computer screens – TV journalist Fiona Bruce, US actor Jake Gyllenhaal, actress Emma Watson and former US President Barack Obama.

Placed in a special pen, each animal was shown two images of human faces. Cereal pellets were dispensed when a sheep crossed an infra-red beam in front of the celebrity image.

Repeating the exercise, without food rewards, the sheep correctly chose the learned celebrity face eight times out of 10.

When the experiment was repeated with the portraits displayed at an angle instead of faceon, the sheep’s performance dropped, but only by about 15%. This is on a par with the ability of humans to recognise partially seen faces.

In a final test, the sheep were shown photos of their handlers and strangers. Seven times out of 10, the sheep chose the face of their handler, despite no prior food-association training.

They also displayed peculiarly human behaviour when deciding between the two images. They checked the unfamiliar face, then the handler’s image, then the stranger’s photo again before settling on the handler’s portrait.

The scientists wrote: “The results of our study show that sheep have advanced face-recognition abilities, similar to those of humans and non-human primates.”

Future research may investigate their ability to identify humans’ emotional expressions. Researchers postulated that, with their face-recognition skills, sheep could be used to investigate Huntington’s disease, a symptom of which is an impaired ability to recognise facial emotion.