Philip Armstrong > Quotes

“The primatologist Thelma Rowell conducted a study of feral sheep that she specifically designed to challenge the prejudices and assumptions about intelligence and social complexity embodied by comparative psychology’s preference for studying animals most like ourselves: that is, other primates. Sheep were chosen as an alternative because they ‘are popularly taken as the very paradigm of both gregariousness and silliness’, and the study concluded that, at least when they are allowed to flock naturally, sheep display forms of emotional and social intelligence equal to or exceeding those of primates. These include ‘an elaborate communicative repertoire and an interactive set of rules for using it’; ‘long-term relationships which can carry over periods in which they are not evident’; and techniques for ‘assessing and attempting to modify interactions between other sheep’, including combinations of behaviours ‘akin to reconciliation’. Moreover, ‘their ability to lead and to respond to leadership exceeds anything that has been reported for a primate.”
― Philip Armstrong, Sheep

“There are several aspects of the domestication of the sheep that might confound our assumptions. First, sheep were not initially domesticated for their meat or wool, but for their milk. The larger and more dangerous aurochs would not be transformed into docile and milk-yielding cattle for another two millennia, so sheep and goats provided the first source of animal milk for prehistoric human societies. To use animals in this way makes better economic sense than raising them for meat: it takes far more energy, land and water for humans to produce feed for animals than it does to derive nourishment directly from crops, so a milk-producing animal delivers on that expensive investment better than one killed for meat. As a result, domestication at first led to a decline rather than an increase in meat consumption.”
― Philip Armstrong, Sheep

“In 2001 the entire cattle and sheep industry of Great Britain was thrown into chaos by the discovery of foot-and-mouth disease in Northumberland. Within nine months, 3.8 million animals had been slaughtered to prevent the spread of the disease; and massive damage to agriculture was compounded by an estimated £10 billion of income lost by the tourist industry due to restrictions on travel in rural areas, and the concomitant discouragement of visitors to Great Britain in general. For a time, the army was required to manage the slaughter of herds suspected of infection, along with the disruption to transport, communications, villages and towns all across the country. All this was demanded, not by the threat of a potentially lethal disease, but by international regulations governing agricultural transport and exchange – for as Franklin points out, foot-and-mouth ‘is harmless to humans and rarely infects them’, while even to sheep it is rarely fatal, and usually ‘no more severe than the common cold’. It mainly causes problems in dairy herds, where (although once again seldom lethal) it reduces milk yield; hence its economic impact, which is massively compounded by the inability of affected countries to trade with countries where the virus is absent or at least quiescent. Sheep are therefore slaughtered during a foot-and-mouth outbreak only because they can transmit unprofitability to other agricultural sectors. Foot-and-mouth disease is ‘only lethal to domestic animals because it is economically intolerable to humans’.”
― Philip Armstrong, Sheep

“Some 2.5 million years ago in Eurasia, during the early Pleistocene, there lived the first sheep, which were as big as Oxen.”
― Philip Armstrong, Sheep

“The association of sheep with stupidity is an artefact of the Western tendency to equate individualism with intelligence, originality, and leadership. In China . . . where conformity is a competitive social skill and the point is precisely not to stand out, the sheep is considered a highly intelligent animal.”
― Philip Armstrong, Sheep

“And there is another trait that relates very closely to a key aspect of the sheep’s psychological and social character: like some other bovids, but unlike goats, sheep have foot glands between their hooves. By this means they leave their scent on the ground as they trot – signing their names on the earth, as it were, wherever they go. These personal scent-trails are crucial to maintaining the bonds between flock members, and particularly the bond that holds ovine society together – that between lamb and ewe.”
― Philip Armstrong, Sheep