What happens when you tell your sheep off for being in the wrong field

January 24, 2016 • 2:45 pm

by Matthew Cobb

I saw this tw**t by @LlyrDerwydd, a Welsh sheepfarmer, who was driving by one of his fields when he saw that a flock of his sheep and got into the wrong field. You need to have the sound turned up:

I sent it to PCC(E) who responded: “that’s bogus! either they’re being herded by a d*g or it’s feeding time!”. By now a scientific pal, Mike Nitabach, had got in on the convo, asking what on Earth was going on. I asked Llŷr Derwydd (his name should have the hat on the ‘y’ of his first name) whether it was a fix:

Here’s Llŷr’s reply:

In other words, all is as it seems: there’s a gate at the top right of the field, and that’s the place the sheep are heading to, to escape the wrath of their master, Llŷr, who is shouting at them to get out of the field… Moral: Sheep aren’t as dumb as we sometimes think.

55 thoughts on “What happens when you tell your sheep off for being in the wrong field”

  1. There’s a political metaphor struggling within this video.

    Outstandingly cute, though but.

      1. Sheep are certainly as stupid as their reputation.

        If you’re driving along a back-country road and there are some sheep grazing maybe 30 yards from the road, as soon as they see you coming they will rush desperately to the road apparently in order to get in front of you. Why this is I have no idea, maybe they think the road is their escape route. They will then run panic-stricken down the middle of the narrow road six feet in front of your car. Slowing down to give them space doesn’t work, they just slow down in front of you. The only way to get past these menaces is to speed up until you can edge alongside them at which point they hurtle desperately into the bushes.

        Cows are no trouble compared with sheep.

        cr

        1. I can confirm he isn’t making this up, or that it’s a one-off. This is indeed typical behaviour.

          1. Years ago when I was at One Tree Hill I. Auckland, I tried to get a picture of individual sheep. Every time I took out my camera, the sheep I was trying to photograph, would turn their backs on me.

          2. Sorta the opposite of cows, then. Just put something unusual in a field (yourself will do) and every cow in sight will come over to inspect it. You. Whatever.

            (That’s the colloquial impersonal ‘you’ of course, not Diana specifically).

            cr

          3. Yes cows are curious. There are some in the field next to me and I’ve had them gather close to see what I’m doing many times. Once, I went out at night and shone a light in the field. Hundreds of eyes twinkled back. It was the cows all staring at me in the darkness. Scary at first, then adorable.

        1. I seem to remember a time when PCCE abjured both Twitter & Facebook…now he just lords it over us who’re still benighted…

          3. I never know where to go with formations like these, where it’s either “he who lords it over us” or “he who lords it over ‘we who are still benighted.’

            I guess “us” is the right answer, but that still seems to leave us with an ungainly “us who are still benighted…”

          4. It seems weird because you removed the “over”. If you say “over we” that sounds wrong because it is. Think of languages that use cases. You studied Russian and I believe Russian uses cases. You probably memorized words that took the dative and accusative. That is how it kind of works. It helps me with English in these situations. For me, I only memorized the German datives out of laziness: aus, außer, bei, mit, seit, von, zu.

          5. Thanks, Diana, very helpful.

            Oh god, I still have nightmares over all six cases of Russian! 😀

          6. That made me look up the Russian cases and they seem to create two separate cases that other languages just plop into the accusative or dative. Latin also has 6 cases but I didn’t pay attention to the ablative and the vocative is easy – used when you address someone. I have my own way of learning I guess.

          9. Omigosh, you’re one of us?! (Where us = non-twits?)

            We need a secret handshake or something…

          13. I do not have a twitter account and never look at it. Not once. Zero interest.

            I see nothing but badness coming from the continuing shortening of the average human attention span.

          14. I have no real love of Facebook either but when your children live far away and all pictures and videos of your grandchildren end up there, you use Facebook or miss a lot of family stuff.

          15. “I do not have a twitter account and never look at it”

            You never look at the account you don’t have?
            Nice goin’.

            I, too, don’t have a twitter account, but I never thought of not-looking at it as I’m not sure where I’d not-find it.

            😉

            As Lewis Carroll didn’t write:

            Yesterday, upon the stair,
            I met a man who wasn’t there.
            He wasn’t there again today,
            I wish, I wish he’d go away…

            cr

          17. I just looked it up, and yes apparently besides being a “a silly annoying person”, a pregnant goldfish is another more obscure meaning.
            You could almost imagine the founders of Tw*tter had the silly annoying definition in mind when choosing that name. Silly, and annoying is how I would characterize it.

  7. It’s like the joke says – Back in the day when men were men and sheep were mighty nervous.

      1. Melbourne Cup joke:
        Q: Why do New Zealand horses run so fast?
        A: They’ve seen what happened to the sheep.

        cr

  10. Talking about the stupidity of sheep always reminds me of the Douglas Adams quote:

    ‘….for they were creatures who learned very little on their journey through life, and would be startled to see the sun rising in the morning, and astonished by all the green stuff in the fields.’

    Just about sums them up for me.

    1. As we rode our bicycles through New Zealand, we saw many sheep (!). And we saw many piles of rocks at the margins of cleared fields.

      Putting 1 + 1 together, we figured, ah, that’s what they did with all the sheeps’ brains …

  12. I own Welsh Corgis (the ones with the tail) I have cats too, but corgis are trained to verbal commands, and drive the sheep from behind. The sheep probably learned this by behavior modification.

    1. I did wonder whether (per CGI) they were going to spell out a message.

      But I think the clip is genuine.

      They do move bloody fast, though.

      cr

  14. Sheep aren’t as dumb as they look, they can recognize individual human and sheep faces. They’ve probably been trained to respond to the car horn or maybe they know that after the horn comes the dogs. Either way, cool clip.

  15. This video would make an excellent opportunity for teaching observation and deductive skills to students of flocking behaviour in sheep (not herding!). At the first sound of horn the sheep nearest right on the screen immediately spins to face down the paddock. Safety in numbers for sheep is not achieved by spreading out: when threatened they come together. Note that sheep to the left head right, those to the right (of screen) head left; both groups head in the direction towards the middle of the paddock.Note that there is a delay before those far down the paddock respond (sound takes its time!). Also following inverse square law the sound intensity is much reduced: the farthest sheep seem casual as a consequence. But persistent noise making by the farmer convinces one or two sheep, ‘the leaders’ maybe, to head for the gate, followed of course by the remainder, behaving thus ‘like sheep’. Whether the flock ‘knew’ where their leaders were is moot: in my little flock,here in NZ, when shouted out, the lambs always high tail it (I have East Friesians)to be the alongside their elders usually near the middle of the paddock. The behaviour displayed is a mix of instinct and learning.

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