Official News page 5

REAL LIFE NEWS: SMART SHEEP

by Hazed

What's with all this research into sheep? Last week I told you about the sheep who eat TNT, this week it's a report that sheep are actually as clever as humans.

Who says so? A professor from Cambridge University in England does. She says that the woolly mammals can match humans in the difficult task of identifying food amid a whole load of buckets.

Jenny Morton worked with a herd of Welsh mountain sheep, presenting them with variously-colored buckets. Only one of the receptacles contained food. The sheep were able to find the grub in the same number of attempts that a human or a money would make - seven.

The prof said, "They have a reputation for being extremely dim, so I didn't expect them to be so amenable to testing and certainly didn't expect them to be so smart. In our tests they performed at a level very similar to monkeys and humans in the initial learning tasks.

"When we then changed the rules they still performed as well as monkeys and better than rodents. They are quite intelligent animals – they seem to be able to recognize people and even respond when you call their name."

That's jolly interesting, but I am not sure it means sheep are as smart as people. Wait till we see a sheep building a house, or driving a car, or solving a crossword puzzle... and if they were all that smart, they wouldn't allow us to eat them!

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