Are Sheep Stupid?

Before we left the suburbs and moved to Gum Tree Gully, we had never given sheep a thought.  Now, having lived with them for 18 years, we're still not sure how stupid they are.  They must have brains, but do they actually use them?

Baby Peter bonds with Tony

They always seem to have a leader. Oscar was the leader of our small flock for most of his life - then he got old and tired and blind, which made leading difficult.  But until then, even when a cocky young male sheep arrived on the scene, Oscar still held on somehow to the kingship. When he finally abdicated, Big Peter took on the role.  Pete is a very large boy, who's been with us since he was just one day old - oh what fun it was, bottle feeding him on demand and cleaning sheep poo off the verandah, and occasionally having to shoo him out of the house.  Peter loves us, and sometimes shows his fondness by running at full speed to meet us (which can be a little frightening for the uninitiated) and affectionately crushing us against a fence with his polar bear-like bulk. 

As long as sheep have a leader, they're excused from thinking for themselves; they can just merrily follow the leader, and in a flock as small as ours - just 5 sheep - there's rarely any sign of dissent.   But how do they know who the leader is? We haven't been able to figure out exactly how the leader is selected.  Then again, perhaps there isn’t really a leader - maybe it's just that Peter is the only one who thinks about going somewhere other than 'here', and the others follow just because... they're sheep. Perhaps their society is in perpetual chaos like humans, and that's why they're sometimes seen running around in circles for no apparent reason, and occasionally head-butting each other. 

Riley tried to be the leader once, but he led the flock into a dead end,
and was never brave enough to try again.  Maisie is at the back -
the only one with enough sense to stop and think before walking into a cul de sac.

We have three paddocks, and whichever one they're in at any given time, they always want to be in a different one.  Open a gate, and sheep will go through it.  Shut the gate, and they want to go back through it the other way.  Maybe going through gates is some kind of really fun game for them.  If so, they must be incredibly bored, which is no surprise, as all they do is eat grass and sleep.  How boring can life get?  That's one reason why we go out and say hello to them often, pat their heads and give them little treats - to give them a bit of interest in life.

Big Peter loves to ruin the fences

We have a few trees that overhang a fence into one of the paddocks, and when the grass is sparse, the sheep stand on their hind legs, leaning on the fence, to get at the trees.  This of course, does wonders for the fence, not.  Sheep are very heavy!  So we try to discourage them, by keeping those branches cut back - but when we throw a whole branch of nice juicy leaves into the paddock for them, they don't want to eat that, they want something else, on some other tree.

In the summer, when the grass has all dried up, we have to give them hay every day.  If we give them one big lump of hay, they fight over it, so we tried breaking it up into five smaller lumps and spreading them out - but they still fight over it, all wanting to eat from the same lump.

Of our five sheep, one stands out as the stupidest, or perhaps the smartest - that's Maisie, who is also the oldest.  We've had her for nearly 10 years, but she still hasn't learned that we don't want to hurt her.  She sees the other sheep come eagerly to us for cuddles and treats, but she still thinks it's best not to trust us.  Then again, maybe she's the only one who's clever enough to know that one of these days it'll be shearing time again, and when they come eagerly to us on that day, they'll be locked in a little pen and assaulted by a man with big scissors.  They hate that.

We don’t really care if our sheep are stupid or not; we're very fond of them - even Maisie. Myrtle is especially lovable with her big beautiful eyes and long lashes, which she knows how to flirt with.  Charlie and Riley are a couple of cute bouncy boys who don't seem to want to grow up. And it’s not Peter's fault that he tends to run us down, like an out of control truck - he's just glad to see us.  And we're glad to see him too.