[LadyShea]

Originally Posted by peacegirl

Anything other than the eyes could be a cue that could help the mother recgognize her baby. It could be the baby's baaa that distinguishes it from other sheep. It could be the baby's smell if that's how sheep identify (I'm not sure), or his unique gait could be a cue. I am not a sheep expert. The point I'm making is that there are other ways for the animal kingdom to identify it's kin other than sight. I recently saw a movie about penguins. They find their young in the middle of thousands and thousands of baby penguins by sound alone.

The studies under discussion, the ones indicating sheep recognition of faces, used photographs.

Here's one from 2001. It didn't even require training the sheep to make a choice, they directly measured brain cell activity

To understand how these visual memories form and gradually fade, Kendrick measured the responses from cells in a part of the sheep's brain known to control facial recognition. Sheep were shown mug shots of unfamiliar and familiar sheep while an electrode measured cell activity in their brains.

"Sheep, like humans, have specialized areas in the brain for face recognition," said Kendrick, and they have a separate system, far less specific, for dealing with the recognition of other objects, such as rocks and trees.

"Whereas you can measure a cellular response to a face, you would have a hard time finding a cellular response to a banana," he added.

Kendrick's team discovered that a large network of cells responded to faces in general. A smaller number of cells respond to familiar sheep faces. An even tinier subset of cells responds to specific, very familiar individuals, such as pen mates of the sheep.

"There may even be cells that respond only to a particular individual," said Kendrick.

Kendrick suggested that memories may fade when circuits dedicated to recognition of a specific individual somehow become more general and are downgraded to "code" for just a familiar face.

http://www.environmentalgraffiti.com...bilities-sheep

The researchers also found female sheep had a definite opinion about what made a ram's face attractive, Dr Kendrick said. "Don't ask me what it is, but certain facial cues of a male do attract females."

Recognising different faces in a flock must be important in helping sheep to arrange hierarchies as well as keep friends. During the experiments – where sheep had to choose between pairs of familiar and unfamiliar faces to get a food reward – the animals would form orderly queues with those at the top of the hierarchy first, Dr Kendrick said. "[So] it is important not to chop and change the social environment of sheep, which is evidently so important for their well being."

Another earlier study showed that even with the other cues, ewes would avoid their white lambs if the lamb had been colored black.

As with both olfaction and hearing, the ability of sheep to use vision to recog-
nise each other was also first established for mother ewes recognising their lambs.
Here it was shown that mothers avoided their normally white lambs if either their
whole body was coloured black or just their heads were blackened (Alexander &
Shillito Walser 1977, 1978). The implication from this is that visual cues from the
head are important for recognition. The same researchers also used this strategy to
show that the animals could recognise different colours on their lambs (Alexander
& Stevens 1979).