A sheep separated from a flock member for over two years will still recognise that face — and researchers measuring brain activity found the neural circuits held a selective encoding of the individual

A sheep separated from a flock member for over two years will still recognise that face — and researchers measuring brain activity found the neural circuits held a selective encoding of the individual

A single sheep can remember about 50 other sheep faces, and hold on to them for more than two years. That is the finding at the heart of a short 2001 paper in Nature, and it still lands hard against the popular idea of sheep as blank, interchangeable followers. The number comes from work led by Keith Kendrick at the Babraham Institute in Cambridge.  We are not neuroscientists or animal-cognition researchers, and this is reading and reflection on…