Sheepishly Sharp!

Don't be sheepishly stupid! is soon going to be a very old fashioned and over used phrase. The new twist in the phrase may be: try to be sheepishly intelligent! What do two sheep do when they meet each other for the first time...other than sniffing the air...they take quick looks at one another...before they get down to the business of collecting food for the day i.e. munching grass.

Most people think that sheep may suffer from the same visual confusion that shepherds and other animal care takers face when they come face to face with a few hundred sheep everyday. Telling the difference between one sheep and another becomes a really complicated exercise...for humans

The interesting news is that even though humans may be dumb at telling one sheep from another, sheep it appears may be quite smart.In an elegant experiment carried out by Keith Kendrick and his colleagues, 20 sheep were trained to recognize and distinguish 25 pairs of sheep faces. Electrodes placed in their heads to measure brain activity showed they could remember up to 50 faces for as long as two years. Based on these observations, Kendrick and
his team have shown that just like humans, sheep have a complex and elaborate system in the brain which allows them to distinguish between many different faces which look very
similar.