Sheep

This morning I looked out of the window at the sheep grazing the hillside. Or: I looked out at the hillside, and noticed the sheep grazing it. Either way, I noticed that they were all facing in the same direction, on a seemingly perfect alignment. It being sunny at the time, with a stiff cool breeze, I wondered whether the sheep were maximising warmth from the sun, or minimising chill from the wind. And as I observed them stepping quite casually forward as they grazed, I wondered what it felt like to think like a sheep.

There appear to be a number of forces acting upon the sheep brain: the wind, the sun, the topology, the vegetation, and other sheep (this being England, predators are not a concern, but presumably the sheep retain some "anxiety" on that front too). Somehow, this combination of factors was acting on the individual sheep to account for their distribution across the hillside and their common alignment. Later it clouded over and then, though I missed the moment of transformation, I noticed that the common alignment had gone. So it seems reasonable to conclude that the direction of the sun was the dominant factor: the sheep felt more comfortable with the sunshine on their flanks, although this does not explain why they were all facing in the same direction. Perhaps the wind was decisive here.

Google is a wonderful thing. A search for "sheep grazing simulation" turns up a number of no doubt fascinating accounts of research into this subject. Being something of a virtual sheep, though, I find myself disinclined to graze this particular virtual pasture. It reminds me of a story last year about geomagnetic cows, apparently confirmed by reviews of Google Earth pictures. Perhaps, in fact, the grazers are heliotropic and the timing of the "observations" is skewed towards midday, when images with less shadow can be obtained: in late morning and early afternoon, a north-south alignment might make more "sense" (to a grazer) than the east-west alignment they might "prefer" in the early morning and late afternoon.

This may seem like idle thought or vain speculation. In fact, its significance, for me, is as a metaphor for thinking and planning. The sheep, without a discussion of who will feed where and when, on what, facing in which direction, individually act so as to achieve their "purpose", as a flock, of feeding efficiently on the available vegetation. Perhaps sheep society is more egalitarian than human society, and if sheep have a mental model of their fellows' behaviour based on their own (which I doubt), it is likely to be more accurate than the human equivalent. And perhaps if we spent more time thinking about sheep, we might learn the secrets of their success!