Learn how sheep act and react as prey and social animals, and how they communicate with each other and their environment. Discover the anatomy, instincts, and emotions of sheep, and how to understand and interact with your flock.

Marino & Merskin’s (2019) (M&M) review provides a useful and well-supported argument for sheep as socially and cognitively complex beings, convincingly countering the long-standing misrepresentation of sheep as simple-minded creatures.

A review of the scientific evidence that sheep are intelligent, emotional, and unique individuals, not the passive and dull-minded animals they are often portrayed as. Learn how sheep recognize faces, feel emotions, and have distinct personalities and social relationships.

The popular stereotype is that sheep are docile, passive, unintelligent, and timid, but a review of the research on their behavior, affect, cognition, and personality reveals that they are complex, individualistic, and social.

This paper reviews scientific research on sheep psychology, challenging common misconceptions and stereotypes. It shows that sheep have complex cognitive, emotional, and social capacities, such as facial recognition, executive functions, and self-medication.

In the first part of this commentary, I suggest that some of the sheep behaviors discussed by Marino & Merskin (2019) (M&M) could be executed automatically with little or no intelligence. I then argue that intelligence is linked to an animal’s ability to make predictions, and I examine the evidence for predictive intelligence in sheep.

Sheep are complex, individualistic, and social animals with cognitive and emotional capacities similar to primates. Learn how a recent report challenges the stereotypes of sheep as docile, passive, and unintelligent.

Sheep are not stupid, but have the ability to learn, remember, recognize and feel emotions. Learn about the experiments and tests that prove sheep are smarter than you think and how they compare to other farm animals.