By Paul RinconScience editor, BBC News
website
8 November 2017
Sheep have demonstrated the ability to
recognise familiar human faces, according to a study.
Cambridge University researchers were able to
train sheep to identify the faces of actors Jake Gyllenhaal and Emma Watson, former
US President Barack Obama and BBC newsreader Fiona Bruce.
After training, the sheep chose photos of
familiar faces over unfamiliar ones significantly more often than not.
It shows that sheep possess similar face
recognition abilities to primates.
Previous studies had shown that sheep could
identify other sheep and human handlers that they already knew.
"What we did is ask whether a sheep
could learn to recognise someone from a photograph," the study's lead
author Prof Jenny Morton said.
"We focused on whether or not an animal
was capable of processing a two-dimensional object as a person."
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