The Wisdom, Intellect, and Emotional Lives of Sheep

Source: Adrian Dorobantu / Pexels

Sheep are amazing animals. I've met a few captive and wild individuals who clearly are very intelligent and emotional with distinct personalities. It's important to separate fact from fiction and to understand who sheep are, not what we want them to be. Characterizations of them as dull-minded and lacking uniqueness are completely misleading, as Rosamund Young highlights in her new book called The Wisdom of Sheep: Observations from a Family Farm. Here's what she had to say about these complex sentient individuals who display cognitive skills previously thought to be uniquely human.¹

Marc Bekoff: Why did you write The Wisdom of Sheep?

Rosamund Young: By the time I’d finished writing The Secret Life of Cows, I realised there were many stories I had not told. We have kept cattle for 70 years but sheep in commercial numbers for only the past 12, and cattle seemed to be the stars of quite a few books, but not sheep, as far as I knew. Also, the response I had from my first book The Secret Life of Cows led me to believe there was an appetite for knowledge, which I was in a position to supply to some extent. In today’s world, farms are getting bigger, and an increasing number of small farms are disappearing, and, therefore, less and less people are in a position to be able to engage with farm animals on a daily basis. I wanted to share what I had witnessed and experienced.

Source: Penguin Random House

MB: How does your book relate to your background and general areas of interest?

RY: The book and my background are one and indivisible. I have lived on a farm all my life, observing and absorbing facts and impressions both consciously and subconsciously. I believe absolutely that everything emanates from diet and freedom. Thus, the quality of my own diet is central to the way I feel, the way I behave, and the way I care for my animals, and what the animals eat dictates how they behave and the quality of their lives, and that dictates the quality of the meat that people eat.

Everything, absolutely everything, is connected. I learned this the hard way: caring for my mother, who suffered ill health of an indefinable nature, and none of the doctors she approached were able to offer any useful advice. I had to try everything in my power to ease her suffering and finally came to realise that her diet was central to her recovery, and, thus, from 1966, we began to scrutinise all the food we consumed. There were so many everyday items whose provenance we could not determine, so we became more and more self-sufficient, growing everything without chemical inputs or artificial fertilisers, though, at that time, we had not encountered the word "organic." Before we became so vigilant, my mother’s health was causing serious problems, and even a few sips of water could make her ill, so we also questioned the quality of the water we were drinking and began making weekly round trips of 60 miles to collect spring water from a source sufficiently high up that no farming activities could have caused any pollution to it.

MB: Who do you hope to reach?

RY: Ideally, I would love the book to be read by farmers as well as non-farmers, ipso facto, everyone, but experience shows that this rarely happens. Books about domesticated animals seem to fall into two categories: learning and pleasure. I admit that I hope those wishing to learn will be entertained and those wishing to be entertained will learn.

MB: What are some of the major topics you consider?

RY: The importance of keeping animals in extended family units and the enormous benefits such a system produces is the main topic of the book. A preponderance of adults means that immunity to things like intestinal worms is acquired from the adults by the youngsters. This cannot occur if animals are segregated by age, and forced early weaning is not only cruel but ridiculously unnecessary. No amount of artificial heat or light or milk substitute can equal the "real" thing, and a mother’s innate ability to teach her offspring her own wisdom/knowledge is irreplaceably vital.

I also wanted to stress the importance of observing animals and learning from what you see. Humans are influenced by other humans and often do things to fit in with their peers. The absence of sophisticated language in animals means that they do not misunderstand one another. Inevitably, people who keep farmed animals have to make decisions about their welfare, but the more freedom animals have to make their own choices, the happier and healthier they will be, and that state of happiness (or lack of stress or whatever you want to call it) will directly affect the quality of meat and the health effect that meat will have on the people who eat it. I also stress the vital importance of unfettered access to good-quality water.

MB: How does your book differ from others that are concerned with some of the same general topics?

RY: I’m not sure. Judging by the books I have read; I would say the differences are quite hard to describe in words. All the books about sheep that I own apart from two deal with basic management advice. The two that treat the sheep as individuals serve to confirm many of my own conclusions.

MB: Are you hopeful that as people learn more about these amazing animals they will treat them with respect?

RY: Most certainly this is my hope, but whether I am actually hopeful (optimistic) is another thing. The disconnectedness of so many people’s lives from the food they eat has happened incredibly recently, less than two generations I would suggest, and this needs to be remedied. The industrial revolution in England resulted in a huge number of rural communities being fragmented, and today there are a huge number of people living in urban environments, buying and not growing their food. Once food is packaged and sanitised with the majority of vegetables being cleaned of the soil they grew in, fruit being packed in boxes, and meat appearing for sale either as ready meals or packaged meal components, it is easy to understand why I have met so many people who literally do not give any thought to where their food comes from.