9 replies to this topic

[terrecar]

This may not be surprising, but the article is interesting nonetheless.

http://abcnews.go.co...ory?id=51014914

[GentleLake]

Another one of those things that science has to "prove', but that many of the rest of us already knew.

 

Heck, I had aquarium fish that could recognize individual faces.

[Mark Billadeau]

How quickly the press forgets what they have already published

https://news.nationa...07_TVsheep.html

And it took researchers 6 years to make the leap that if sheep could reconize sheep faces they might also reconize human human faces.

[Smalahundur]

I was just going to post that I had read similar research, with similar conclusions years ago.

[terrecar]

Sorry about that. I didnt realize this had been posted before, particularly its connection to research into Huntingtons disease.

[D'Elle]

Another one of those things that science has to "prove', but that many of the rest of us already knew.

 

Heck, I had aquarium fish that could recognize individual faces.

 

So did I! Or, my family did when I was a kid. It was a Jack Dempsy fish who liked my mother best because she fed him. when she approached the aquarium he got excited, swam back and forth looking right at her. He didn't have the same reaction for any of the rest of us, but he did seem to like me second best because I paid attention to him.  I taught  him to follow my finger on the aquarium wall and also to follow a tiny flashlight beam around the aquarium and through a tunnel in order to get a treat. 

 

Really, why would anyone have thought that sheep couldn't recognize human faces? 

[terrecar]

During one of my herding lessons, my trainer had us each go in the field with a newer flock of light sheep without our dog. The objective was to get the flock through a set of panels without the dogs help. At one point, one of the ewes stood to the side of the left gate, lifted her head and stared me down before moving around it. Im pretty sure she was saying, Who the $#@& are you?

[terrecar]

It occurs to me that I wasnt clear in my above post. What I got from the ewes curiosity was that she did not recognize me, so it stands to reason the inverse is true; that she would recognize her owner and behave differently. That may have been evident, but just in case it wasnt...

[D'Elle]

This topic reminds me of a hummingbird I had an interesting encounter with one time.

 

I was living in Mexico, in a place where most of the houses didn't necessarily have walls, and none had window glass or screens.

 

I moved into a different place to house-sit for friends for a few months, and they told me that a hummingbird came through every morning, in one window and out the other.

 

As I moved in, I took down one thing they had on the wall and put up a different thing in that same place. I moved the table slightly and put on a different table cloth, and I set up something on a shelf that had been empty. Everything else I left pretty much the same.

 

The very first morning I woke up in the house, the hummingbird came in while I was having coffee. It stopped half way through the house and hovered. Then it turned around, and went over to hover and stare at the new thing on the wall for a few seconds. Then it went over to the table and did the same thing, and then flew over to the shelf and examined it for a few seconds. Finally, it came over to me, and hovered about a foot in front of my face and examined me. Then it flew on out.

 

After that, the hummingbird only flew through every morning as usual.

[Smalahundur]

A hummingbird flying through your house, sounds pretty cool, and quite exotic from my perspective...