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.
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........