You might ignore this one fact by now but here it is: sheep are just overall incredibly fun. As a species, they have been part of humanity for centuries, thanks to their docile and often extroverted nature, and helping us keep warm in the process.
Here are some of the most curious and funny facts you might not know about our wooly friends:
They have a weirdly special digestive system
Since sheep is a ruminant animal, their diet is mainly based on grass and cereals. This means they have to chew on their food, swallow and then chew again what they just deposit in their stomachs. Weird, right? Also, the sheep is a polygastric species, having developed a stomach divided into 4 clearly differentiated parts, allowing them to have an estimated capacity of 11 liters. Their digestive process can take up for days and this is in part the reason for their milk to have over three times the protein content of your regular cow milk, making it easier for us humans to metabolize it.
You can know their age based on their teeth
Just like us, lambs have milk teeth that are substituted by a set of their definitive teeth. However, these don’t change overnight, but as the sheep grow. If the sheep still has baby teeth, it is not even one year old. Normally, sheep can live from 8 to even 20 years!
What’s the deal with their eyes?
One of the most particular features of a sheep is their eyes. We don’t know what is, we just know they are strange and odd looking. The reason is that their pupils are rectangular, helping them to regulate the quantities of light they receive. According to a study from Nature Magazine, their eyes make them capable to recognize and identify up to 50 different individuals for up to two years!
They need salt on a daily basis
Besides their regular, grassy diet, sheep need some important quantities of salt due to the minerals it has. Sheep and lambs need salt to prevent dehydration and to help with their digestive processes, improving the metabolization of the nutrients they obtain by pasturing. The problem is that salt is not naturally present in their favorite food, so that is why farmers often give them blocks of salt they love to lick all day.
Sheep have a great defense system
Have you ever wondered why sheep like to be in a group all the time? Not only they enjoy each other’s company, but several studies have also identified they like to be together in order to ensure their individual safety from potential predators. Sheep on their own are not sufficiently independent to defend themselves from wolves or other predators, so they adopted basically the same defense system from a shoal of fish, that prefer to stick together and synchronize their swimming patterns in order to avoid the attacks of other larger fish. When danger comes, their instinct tells them to go straight to the center of the herd and hide with the multitude. This pattern is continuous, and it can even be proved by mathematical models!