The leader has to be more attentive of the group's environment than a follower who can basically doze off standing/walking while its swarming reflexes take over. Reminds me of how a group of cyclists (or a formation of geese) will take turns at the lead position in the wind, spreading the work for overcoming drag. It's not about physical work for sheep, but mental stress can be just as taxing. And chances are that the lead sheep won't graze as efficient while being distracted by leadership decisions as it would while just tagging along (focusing more on which grass cluster looks more delicious?) and then it's just as meaningful you balance the load as it would be between cyclists, or geese (geese actually do the same also on the ground, but there it's not just the mental load, those currently on guard duty actually don't feed at all because the stretch themselves as high as they can to get a better view)
Also happens in, for example, ants[0], or any other animal that does follow-the-leader without a timeout mechanism like boredom.
Humans exhibit the same general behaviour, but followers are more (read, at all) likely to notice they're going in a circle and break off. (Usually quite quickly.)
I only worked with shepherds for a few years about 50 years ago.
These are all my personal observations, so anecdotal.
I do recall rams taking leads. Most of the rams had bells on their necks.
The only thing sheep in general were able to do is follow the sound of the closest bell.
Most think that in large flocks the shepherd directs the dogs to guide all the sheep. This is not the case with the shepherds I worked with. They only need to guide the "edge" rams. All the sheep follow the loudest bell. The rams in the middle of the herd follow the edge rams' bell, and the edge rams get guided by the dogs. The dog gets directed by the shepherd. Exception to this is when there are stragglers.
Sheep do rotate, that is, if you look at it from the top and the herd makes a circle then the circle keeps rotating, both overall, and rotating the inner ones outwards. They do this while moving in a general direction. Weirdest thing to see.
There were some herds where few billy goats with bells were included. If a herd gets attacked they make a circle, all sheep facing inward. The goats all face outward. Go figure.
As a last note, ram riding is not as easy as it seems. As a little boy I try to hang on, but they go from 0 to crazy in seconds, and blow into the middle of the herd. Then, spend hours to get the flees off.
> As a last note, ram riding is not as easy as it seems.
This guy knows his Ovis aries (Sheep). I too tried the wild white ride when I was a boy, and never graduated to bulls. As a teenager I spent a full afternoon trying to save 100 head unsheared sheep who walked off a short cliff into a crocodial infested river (Wet sheep are heavy af!). I have developed a deep loathing for animals that are not smart enough to prevent their own death.
The paper is suggesting that sheep in herds tend to follow each other, and in that sense end up with "leaders" - that is, a single or relatively few animals that are able to direct the herd as it moves for a short while. Reminds me of watching boids
Makes sense. Honestly we do this too - when travelling in large crowds certain people take on the role of leader (one person parting crowds who is large or particularly determined to get to their friend or just happened to be first, and chains of others follow them because it's the right general direction as well and is easier than pushing through oncoming traffic)
Interestingly, I think it's usually the second or the third who actually decide if the herd will follow "the leader". If one individual breaks off, the herd will not follow it. But if a small critical mass turns to the same direction, it might.
Many years ago I drove truck on the weekends. I delivered cannery waste (pea pods, cauliflower leaves and ends, corn husks and cobs, etc...) to sheep ranches, dairies and feed lots.
I would arrive at the field and open the gate to drive into the field. If the sheep were close they would all run out the gate at the truck. I would put the truck in granny low and slowly inch along and the sheep would follow me back into the field. One sheep (the leader?) begin to run as fast as they could circling the truck with all of the other sheep following in a large circle as I drove across the field. In a vain attempt to gain access to the contents of the truck aka lunch. When I got the area of the field we were dropping the feed, I would stop the truck and get out. The sheep were still running around the truck but giving me a wide berth. I would open the back of the truck, turn on the wet kit and activate the hydraulic walking floor. Then I would walk back to the front of the truck, all the while the sheep were running around the truck, except for the 10 or 15 that could get to the feed that fell out the open door. I put it back into granny low and inched forward. The sheep continued to run around the truck but as I spread the feed gradually less sheep were making the full circuit as the smarter (relatively speaking of course) or quicker ones saw food and were able to begin eating.
This is the conclusion one quickly arrives to after having spent even just a small amount of time working in Livestock Ag, they seem like the ideal animal to exhibit the effective methods in Human breeding/gene selection for desirable traits to create a docile and stupid enough animal that is incredibly tasty when cooked and whose wool was once useful commodity for textile use; because by contrast goats are incredibly intelligent and agile that persists despite centuries of being livestock.
With that said, what does this title have to do with the article linked to which is titled:
Presence or absence of stabilizing Earth system feedbacks on different time scales
I think this is a good representation of how people comment on a topi based on the headline without reading the article, or even click on the link.
> Please accept my apologies. As you correctly noted, the paper linked here is
No need, I was just wondering if I was the only one to have clicked the link since the entire page just kept going on tangents about sheep when the link was about the study on climate change and I felt incapable of drawing any other conclusion. > >
> Going off-topic is not allowed on HN ?
I'm sure it is, and I'm guilty of it as well, but again I was just wondering if anyone bothered to click their link before dusting off their anecdotal stories about sheep's intelligence, or lack thereof.
>With that said, what does this title have to do with the article linked to which is titled:
>Presence or absence of stabilizing Earth system feedbacks on different time scales
Yup, I didn't click the link to read the article. Mostly on purpose. I have worked with livestock since a child and many of the "educated" have not. Am I an expert, probably not, but I usually know what not to do. Like imply sheep have cognitive intelligence.
I think the word "leader" may be subtly misleading. Do the "temporal leaders" _intend_ to lead, or are group members near the margins of the herd doing whatever they feel like, and sometimes are just followed by those closest to them which can start a larger group movement?
As an analogy, a viral video going around purports to show an outdoor restaurant with tables on both sides of a sidewalk, where diners panic and run after a fitness class runs through -- they assume that the runners must be running from something. Are the runners "leading" the diners, just because they are followed? I would say no.
That sounds just like Arrow's impossibility theorem, which shows that in every reasonable preferential voting system, there is a "dictator", somebody whose preferences match the result. (AFAIK it's derived from a fixed-point theorem.)
However, the word "dictator" is a misnomer; the "dictator" is not chosen ahead of time, changes on every vote and doesn't force his preferences on others in any way.
> That sounds just like Arrow’s impossibility theorem, which shows that in every reasonable preferential voting system, there is a “dictator”, somebody whose preferences match the result. […]
> However, the word “dictator” is a misnomer; the “dictator” is not chosen ahead of time
There are three technical errors here:
(1) Arrow’s theorem doesn’t define a “dictator” as someone whose preferences match the result but as someone whose preferences determines the result with no input from the other voters preferences.
(2) Arrow’s theorem doesn’t say that every reasonable preference voting system has a dictator, it says that no preference voting system satisfies unanimity, pareto-efficiency (if everyone prefers X to Y, the result prefers X to Y), independence of irrelevant alternatives (the result preference between X and Y, depends only on pairwise preferences between X and Y and cannot be changed by changing ballots in a way which retains the same preferences between X and Y), and non-dictatorship.
(3) The dictator may not be preselected (e.g., the “random ballot” method), but the system providing and giving force to the election does force their preferences on everyone else.
Additionally:
Using “reasonable” to describe a voting system which satisfies pareto-efficiency and independence of irrelevant alternatives but not non-dictatorship is…odd. There is a reason that real-world preference voting systems prefer to compromise one or both of the other conditions rather than non-dictatorship in most cases.
This isn't what Arrow's theorem says. It's not just that there is always someone whose vote happens to match the result (like a fixed-point theorem would). It says that there is a ballot that determines the result.
In other words, the quantifiers are reversed. Instead of "for every list of votes, there is a voter where the outcome is the same as his vote", it is "there is a voter such that for every list of votes, the outcome is the same as his vote."
Now, this doesn't have to be the same person every time you take a vote. The voting systems described in Arrow's theorem just take an ordered list of votes and return a result, and the dictator corresponds to an index in this list. So you can order the votes differently each time if you want, but at the end of the day, it's just a process for deciding how to pick a dictator.
I suppose we're just ignoring the true leaders, the shepherds and sheepdogs.
Sheep don't exist as a species in the wild, at least not for very long, so it seems silly to speak about how they behave and "govern" themselves, because they have almost no control of their long term behavior.
Seems like the "leader" elected from their collective is just a facade of self determination.
There are two wild species of sheep in North America, Dall and Bighorn. Hunting is usually restricted to adult males that have horns which make a full curl, i.e. 360 degrees. It takes approximately 8 years for them to mature to that point. They're rare but hunters find them every year.
I don't know much about them or how their behavior differs from domestic flocks. But in the wild they do have social structures and they butt heads to challenge each other. Like most social mammals, leaders provide direction and protection.
The loss of antlers and horns is one of the key characteristics of domesticated herd animals. They don't need them for protection against predators or intra-species rivalry, because a) we humans and our dogs do all the defensive work and b) we humans control how they mate with each other so there's no benefit for males to fight for resource and mating rights.
When I say "sheep" above, I'm referring to domesticated sheep, as is this article, not their wild cousins which certainly have different behavior.
Our ancestors did. Humans cultivated sheep from wild ancestors for easier harvesting of their wool, milk, and meat.
The domesticated sheep that we know today are completely co-dependent on humans for survival. If we disappeared, they would all die. Maybe some would manage evolve back into some wild version.
I wonder if they discussed the problem with the shephard of the flock they studied. His insights may be be relevant. I think in some herds there is an alpha male that has a bell on his neck and sheep follow him.
The lead sheep is an ewe, and the other sheep follow her if I need to move them. She's dominant and will shove everyone out of the way if there's something she wants. They have a social ranking that changes slightly depending on a bunch of factors, but it's pretty much matriarchal. My lead sheep's daughters have high status, too.
My ram has a bell so I know where he is, because rams can be dangerous and the bell sound gives me warning if he decides to sneak up behind me.
Shepherds will put bells on their lead sheep so they can find them again if they're grazing in large pastures. Less dominant sheep will tend to stay close to lead sheep.
All of this is surprisingly variable depending on sheep breed. More domesticated sheep breeds tend to have stronger flocking instincts, which makes them easier to herd.
I think the bells have nothing to do with alpha male/flock leadership. It's more about the auditory alerts they provide the shepherd. Locating, startled flock, charging rams, etc. with the added benefit of making predators wary.
Although I was somewhat joking, the animal world shows a surprising amount of intelligence most people assume isn't there. Mammals especially show a lot of social intelligence. I'm sure there will be many more such discoveries.
