great lakes dairy sheep symposium - the Department of Animal ...

SHEEP BEHAVIOR AND ITS USE IN SHEEP MANAGEMENT
Harold W. Gonyou
Prairie Swine Centre and the University of Saskatchewan
Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Canada
I am sure that we all stop now and again as we are working with our animals and just
watch as they play, fight, groom themselves or eat. Animal behavior is an interesting part of
raising animals. Behavior is also studied, not for amusement or idle curiosity, but to find ways to
improve how we care for our animals. There are a number of different ‘fields’ of behavior that
have developed, each of which has a major emphasis behind it. In this paper on the behavior of
sheep, I will use examples from three of these fields: psychology, ethology, and behavioral
ecology. There is a fair amount of overlap among these fields, even to the point that some of my
examples would be classified differently by others. But the basic question is, “What behavior
works well for an animal in a particular situation?”
Psychology: Learning
The study of learning has been closely associated with the field of psychology. In most
learning situations an animal must link the performance of a behavior with its outcome. You
may have had sheep that learned to lift the latch on a gate, resulting in their being able to escape
from the yard or pen. This was used in New Zealand as a means to move sheep through the
various holding pens at the slaughter plant. One sheep, that was not to be slaughtered, was
trained to open gates and move through the pens and eventually escaped through a final gate to
obtain a food reward. The other sheep would calmly follow, and find themselves next to the
stunning pen (Bremmer et al., 1980).
Another form of learning involves food selection. Most learning requires an immediate
result for the animal to make the connection between its behavior and the outcome. However, it
was recognized that animals would learn to avoid certain foods if they caused sickness, even if
the effect wasn’t apparent for several hours. This ‘aversive conditioning’ was seen as a means
for animals to avoid poisonous plants. Fred Provenza, at Utah State University, began his study
of food selection in sheep looking at the avoidance of toxic plants. He then shifted his attention
to the selection of other foods based on the positive experiences the animals had with them.
Based on their post-ingestive feedback, that is, the feelings the food created in the animal as it
was digested, he has studied how sheep select a range of plant and feedstuffs to achieve a good
nutrient balance (Provenza, 1995).
Ethology
The field of ethology studies the natural behavior of a species, and how this would have
evolved. Applied ethology was seen as a means of improving the care of domestic animals by
trying to accommodate their nature behavior. The adage ‘Fit the farm to the animal, not the
animal to the farm’ summarizes this approach. One of the most intriguing studies of the natural
behavior of sheep was conducted on a small island off the coast of Scotland. St. Kilda was the
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