Sheep have shown they can recognise human faces!
In an experiment by university researchers, a group of sheep were trained to recognise the faces of four celebrities: actors Jake Gyllenhaal and Emma Watson, former US President Barack Obama and BBC newsreader Fiona Bruce.
Maybe the experiment also proves the animals were up to date with their knowledge of current affairs! There’s probably quite a few humans who can’t even identify all of those people!
In a report published in Open Science, the team from Cambridge University reported: “In this study, we trained eight sheep to recognize the faces of four celebrities from photographic portraits displayed on computer screens. After training, the sheep chose the ‘learned-familiar’ faces rather than the unfamiliar faces significantly above chance.
“Finally, we asked whether sheep could recognize a very familiar handler from photographs. Sheep identified the handler in 71.8 ± 2.3% of the trials without pretraining.”
When I think of scientific research, I imagine people standing around in lab coats putting drops of different substances into test tubes. This sounds like a much more fun experiment!