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It is known that sheep can recognise as many as fifty human faces. Now some Cambridge University researchers have trained eight Welsh Mountain ewes to distinguish between photographs of actors Jake Gyllenhaal and Emma Watson, former United States President Barack Obama and BBC newsreader Fiona Bruce. Professor Jenny Morton, the study’s lead author, said this proved these creatures are “capable of processing a two-dimensional object as a person”.
The fact some sheep can distinguish a white female television presenter from a black male former president may not seem big news, especially in our turbulent world. “Face recognition is a sophisticated process,” added Morton. “But they’ve got big brains, they see other sheep, and they use this processing to recognise one another.” No doubt to defer accusations of academic absurdity, her team insisted this might help research into human ailments by aiding efforts to monitor new drugs given to sheep with mutations of Huntington’s disease.
Yet even on its own terms this study should make us pause for thought. Sheep are seen as simple animals, their gregarious social nature giving rise to derogatory expressions in our language. Now we are told the face-recognition skills of these ruminants are similar to those of advanced primates such as monkeys, apes and, yes, humans. This small study is one more tiny step forward in our understanding of the natural world. And each time we learn a little bit more, it raises fresh questions over our relationship with animals.
Perhaps you have been entranced by The Blue Planet II, the BBC’s latest amazing adventure into the oceans. The first instalment alone revealed a fish changing sex and another leaping from the sea to snatch birds. The most surprising scene, however, was an orange-spotted tusk fish methodically fetching a clam then carefully prising it open on a special piece of coral. “I think we have all been quite staggered by the physical and cognitive abilities of a lot of the animals,” said Rachel Butler, the sequence director. “I don’t think any of us were quite prepared for what we would find down there.”
Once it was thought use of tools distinguished humans from animals. Now we find even fish use them to get breakfast. These creatures are sentient, smart and sometimes social, performing tasks that match some of our own from co-operative hunting through to complex face recognition. In his fine book What A Fish Knows, the ethologist Jonathan Balcombe reveals a goby can memorise the topography of a tidal pool in one take while a squid can navigate a maze faster than a dog. “A fish is an individual with a personality,” he concludes, arguing that they can plan and learn, soothe and scheme, experience moments of pleasure, fear, playfulness, pain, possibly even joy:
“A fish knows and feels.”
Move higher up the animal kingdom and we find more shared traits. Studies have found chickens can delay gratification, pigs play video games, octopuses unscrew lids from jars and elephants grieve for their dead. Cetaceans (aquatic mammals) seem to have ability to feel emotions, share language and perform complex tasks together. Learning from past experiences was long seen as another hallmark of human beings – yet rats, chimpanzees, dolphins and even some birds display signs of “episodic memory” skills.
The concept of cognitive superiority has been entrenched in human outlook for thousands of years. From farming to medical research, from circuses to zoos, this belief informed our approach to animals as we captured them, imprisoned them, slaughtered them, tortured them and ate them. Yet what if we are wrong and, as some scientists suggest, homo sapiens just possess an alternative form of intelligence? And what does it mean if we are discovering that animals share many traits long thought to define our species?
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