Sheep senses and social cognition (0)

Sheep senses and social cognition
Sheep generally are held in low regard as far as cognition and social skills are concerned. However there is now interesting evidence from studies of their behaviour and brain function that they have highly sophisticated social and emotional recognition skills using faces, voices and smell. They are able to recognize and remember many diferent sheep and humans for several years or more and appear to have some capacity for forming mental images of the faces of absent individuals. The precence of such social cognition abilities in this species means that we must pay careful attention to welfare factors such as the composition and stability of their social environment as well as the nature of our own interactions with them . To many humans sheep are regarded as being as close to an automaton and amindless animal species as can be imagined and any serious consideration of their cognitive, social and general mental faculties deemed futile . I can give example about sheep memory . Every summer , just about time when apples are cooked, my mothers sheep flock goes to find appletrees. They could go there every season and after winter in barn it would be obvious that they wouldnt even remeber but they do.
What senses do you think sheep has?
Sensory discrimination abilities and their uses
Sheep like other species have adapted thier senses to achieve remarkable discrimination skills. These allow them to identify importnant individuals and objects in their environment and communication of social signals . Popular belief tends to emphasise the absolute importance of smell for sheep in line with many other mammals, however as we shall see this another misconception with all three major senses playing essential roles.
Vision
Sheep depend heavily on their vision. They have excellent peripheral vision and can see behind themselves without turning their heads. However, they have poor depth perception. They cannot see immediately in front of their noses. Some vertical vision may also have been sacrificed in order to have a wider field of vision. For example, it is doubtful that a sheep would be able to see something in a tree. There was a research about sheep recognising faces and genders. Pictures of sheep and humans were shown. Sheep was supposed to choose between face images in order to gain access to the real individuaal whose face- picture had been seen . The sheep chose sheep faces over human ones and familiar sheep faces over unfamiliar ones. For the studies was used only female sheep. So when they were sexually interested they chose male faces every time.
Color perception
Contrary to previous thought, sheep and other livestock perceive colors , though their color vision is not as well-developed as it is in humans. Sheep will react with fear to new colors.
Hearing
Sheep have excellent hearing. They can direct their ears in the direction of a sound . Sound arrives at each ear at slightly different times , with a small difference in amplitude. Sheep are frightened by high-pitched and loud noises, such as barking dogs or firecrackers.
Smell
Sheep have an excellent sense of smell. They are very sensitive to what different predators smell like. Also they can smell their caretaker, its learned by food reward. Smell helps rams locate ewes in heat and ewes locate their lambs. Sheep also use their sense of smell to locate water and determine subtle or major differences between feeds and pasture.
Taste
The sense of taste in sheep is probably not as important as the other senses. However, sheep have the ability to differentiate different feedstuffs and taste may play a role in this ability. When presented with a variety of feeds, sheep will select certain feeds over others. Sheep will select different types and species of plants than other livestock.
Touch
Since the sheep's body is covered with wool or coarse hair , only the nose , lips, mouth, and maybe ears readily lend themselves to touching behavior . However, touching is important to the interaction between sheep. Lambs seek bodily contact with their mothers and the ewes respond to touching in many ways , including milk letdown in response to the nuzzling/suckling stimulus of lambs. When young lambs sleep , they will seek out their mothers and lie close to them.
Sheep conscious of their surroundings and thinking about individuals or objects in their absence
Do you think that sheep are conscious?
A number of complex behaviours are higly suggestive of consciousness , such as self-recognition, social communication, individual recognition of members of their own, or other, species, deceit and emphati and complex rule learning . However, reasonable evidence for many of these behaviours has only been provided in higher primates and even in these cases experiment are often open to re- interpretation due to limitations in the paradigms used. Recent advantages in functional brain Imaging techniques using magnetic resonance Imaging and positron emissioon tomography have allowed studies to be conducted in humans aimed at understanding which brain regions are functionally active during actual perception of objects. The implications of research are that if we can show that the sheep brain processes complex sensory information from objects in the same way that the human brain does then it should have at least some capacity to form mentaal images of them in their absence and hence potentially be consciously aware.